The Mark of a Leader

On writing a book

As this blog goes live I am also publishing the first of what I hope will be many books.

Writing a book is an incredible task. It is not like writing a blog, because blogs are somehow ephemeral. Writing a book is very permanent. Trees are felled. Money exchanges hands. People invest their time to read. They invest their opinions, good and bad. And at somepoint the book takes on a life of its own.

I play music, and love to play live but hate to record, because you second guess yourself and do it again every time you hear the recording afterwards. You wonder why you played certain things and every mistake hits you like a sledgehammer. It is hard for me to just "surrender" when recording music.

One of my musical heroes, Joni Mitchell, who is both a brilliant painter and musician, talked about the issue on her great old album Miles of Aisles talking about the difference between performing arts and painting, which in this case is akin to writing a book. In a break between songs you could hear the audience calling for her hits -"Play Carrie" "Both Sides Now" "Blue". She laughed and said "That's always been a major difference between the performing arts and being a painter. A painter does a painting and he does a painting that's it. He's had the joy of creating it and he hangs it on some wall and somebody buys it and then somebody buys it again, or maybe nobody buys it and it sits up in a loft somewhere until he dies. But nobody ever says to him - nobody ever said to Van Gogh "Paint A Starry Night again man"."

At some point, whether you are writing, painting, playing music or leading people to do something they have never done before, you have to let go and just trust whatever it is you trust - your gut, a higher power, experience, wisdom. Or maybe just that you're not as stupid as the voice inside your head might want you to believe.

We all have something to say. We all have something to contribute. To me, great leaders understand that, and know how to get their people to contribute, no matter how modest they themselves may believe the contribution is.

Photo: Ralph Nardell

On Accountibility

I love stories, great storytelling, and great storytellers. Whether they tell with words, with music, with visual arts, multimedia - whatever the style, great storytellers bind societies and cultures. And, sadly, all too often, the power of story has been lost in today's results-obsessed corporate climate.

I like the metaphor of "story" as a way to view life. Because in my mind, if you accept that your life, your career and everything that happens in them is your story, it forces accountability. By accepting the metaphor you accept that you are authoring your story, you are the central character in your story, and you are in control. You control or 'write' the plotline, the people who are part of your story and the roles they play, and so on. And, most important, you control the personality and style of you, the central character. In other words, you are accountible for yourself.

Accountability is the cornerstone of leadership. You are either accountible for what you do or you are not.

It has been fascinating to watch the CEOs of the great implosion companies of the last decade - Enron, Nortel, Worldcomm, Tyco, and so on - deny their accountibility in court. The act of denying their accountibility, in my mind, marks their leadership.

By denying accountibility, they deny the core of their leadership. And for their denial they deserve whatever the courts throw at them.

If you are going to take the mantle of leadership, and the perks that go with it, take the accountibility as well. If you are not prepared to do that, then you put yourself in the august company of the business leaders of the 90s who are currently in jail, pergatory - or a pine box.

Embrace the revolution of change

If you find yourself caught in a whirlwind of change, it may be a good time for you to decide you want to exert some leadership.  Embrace the revolution.  By embracing change and not resisting it (as so many of us are inclined to do), you will find that you are able to have an incredible impact on the world around you.

Take the Beatles.  One of thier greatest strengths was that they embraced change.  As I write in The Mark of a Leader book:

They took chances, tried new things, and listened to everything around them to see what they could learn. They were in a constant state of reinvention and innovation.

If you look at the evolution of the Beatles and their song catalogue, from the first simple three-chord love songs like “She Loves You” through Sgt. Pepper to their final works on Abbey Road and Let It Be, the change is incredible. All through their seven years, they were like chameleons.

Significantly, though, they changed not because the market forced them to but because they wanted to. Change was in their DNA, and they mastered it.

That’s the secret of any great business.

If you want to create a revolution, you have to live that revolution. Whether it’s in the world of music or any other business.

What kind of revolution are you trying to create?

Welcome to The Mark of a Leader blog

The Mark of a Leader Blog is where I share stories and ideas about leadership -about people and companies who have made an indelible mark on the world around them.