Book Description & Author's Note "Why I Wrote This Book."

History is filled with accounts of great leaders, but how did they become so? Written for emergent leaders in any endeavor, this new work from renowned consultant Richard Strozzi-Heckler offers a new approach to leadership. The first book of its kind to base business and management strength on integral body awareness, the book presents key principles such as shugyo, or self-cultivation, as crucial in developing the individualresponsibility, social commitment, and moral and spiritual vision required to lead with authority and efficacy. The Leadership Dojo is based on three questions: What does a leader do? What are the character values most essential to exemplary leadership? How do you teach these values? Drawing on the wisdom of ages from Plato to the Bhagavad-Gita, from Thucydides to the Abidharma, the book asserts that understanding and answering these questions holds the key to superior leadership skills. Strozzi-Heckler teaches with real-world examples based on his wide experience training decision-makers at companies like AT&T and Microsoft. The book’s multifaceted approach helps readers establish a powerful Leadership Presence, a platform from which they can take ethical action with compassion and pragmatic wisdom.

Personal Note from the Author on "Why I Wrote This Book."

      Ever since I can remember I’ve been intrigued by individuals who have been successful in their fields while being grounded in a strong moral and spiritual sensibility.  This included professional and Olympic athletes, social leaders, businessmen, politicians as well as military commanders.  I saw that their self-mastery was not simply due to the acquisition of certain skills but that there was a constellation of values and character traits that were part of who they were.  That is, it was embodied in them.  Later I saw that this tradition was clearly articulated in the eastern traditions of meditation, martial arts, and the fine arts like calligraphy, flower arranging, and pottery, for example.  In other words there were historical precedents of this idea that went back thousands of years. How had we forgotten this?  Why isn’t this taught in schools and universities? I wondered.

      As I became a practitioner of the martial arts (primarily aikido), sports, (I was an All-American in Track and Field and ran in the 1967 pre-Olympic meet and Central American Games), and meditation it became further clear to me that these practices created a way of being in the world that cultivated skillful action, grounded compassion, and pragmatic wisdom.  It seemed to me that through a certain set of practices one could contact a deep well of energy and therefore being-ness that would align one to their purpose in the world in which they could be successful and fulfilled while contributing to others.  This was exciting and a true calling for me: personally studying how self-mastery is attained and to bring it those individuals who were in a position of influencing policy and others; leaders, in other words.  This was something that I could not, not do. I was passionate about it and wanted it for myself and for whoever else wanted to drink.  It is how I think, feel, and see.

      While this path was littered with broken bones (mine), sleepless nights, long flights to India and Japan, a frustration at my own limitations, a battered ego, and a number of dead end streets, the fog slowly cleared and there emerged a pattern that cut across cultural and historical boundaries.  I took what I was learning and tested it in corporate settings, the military, public courses, non-profits, and always in my daily ups and downs.  I took my notes, wrote papers on it, which finally became the book, The Leadership Dojo.  Once Gary Snyder, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, said to me that he wrote in order to understand what he was thinking about.  This was the case with this book…and to contribute to training the leaders, for both those who have followers and those that are leading their own life.

                  - Richard Strozzi Heckler (click for more)