Featured Excerpts

(1) From Introduction (pgs 3-5)
(2) Chapter 1 - We Are All Leaders (pgs 9-10)
(3) Chapter 2 - The Cultivation of Self (pgs 25-26)
(4) Chapter 4 - You Are What You Practice (pgs 55 & 56)
(5) Chapter 6 - Leadership Presence (pgs 117 & 118)


Introduction (pgs 3-5)
In an initial meeting with forty senior executives at AT&T, for example, I proposed the question, "What does a leader do?" and I received forty different answers. Responses included motivate others, execute plans, manage meetings, delegate responsibility, give orders, design strategies, produce organizational charts, make speeches, inspire, balance the budget, hire the right people, build alliances, mobilize skills, maintain an optimistic mood, and so on, until we had a whiteboard filled with the varied activities that took up an executive's time. This informal poll was duplicated in other companies, and inevitably it was the same: as many different answers as there were people. While all these activities were relevant to leadership, it was clear to me that performing these tasks didn't necessarily make a successful leader. I wanted to know who the person was behind these activities. What ground of being did he or she embody to successfully perform these actions? My second question, "What are the character values most essential to exemplary leadership?" produced an entirely different response. The answers fell into a consistent and predictable pattern.

Whether the poll was taken with Chilean telecommunication executives, the senior leadership of the Marine Corps, thirty-something technology entrepreneurs, European financiers, directors of nonprofits, U.S. Senators, CEOs of Fortune 100 companies, or Canadian utilities executives, the same virtues unfailing appeared. Honesty, accountability, integrity, vision, commitment, empathy, courage, trustworthiness, and self-control showed up time and again as the hallmarks of a leader. The literature and research on the character aspects of leadership also reflected this response.

There seemed to be a universal consensus about the type of character values necessary for leadership and for leading an honorable life. Moreover, this list of values was hardly new. As far back as Plato and Thucydides in the West, and the Indian epic Bhagavad Gita and Buddhist text Abidharma in the East, these attributes have long been distinguished as the cornerstones of exemplary leadership and life. It seems that as long as human beings have recorded their history there has been universal agreement about what kind of person is a successful leader.

When I asked my final question, "How do you teach these virtues?" I was met with blank stares. It seemed I had reached the end of the trail. Most managers and leaders could say very little about how the character values of leadership are learned, and even among the brightest, the conversation descended into clichés: "It's either there or it isn't"; "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink"; "Leaders are born not made." Presumably, this has something to do with the difficulty of measuring values, and business schools are notorious for demanding empirical measurements for everything. A typical refrain in the business world is, "If it can't be measured, don't manage it." Nonetheless, the point is we can give examples of a leader's behavior but nothing about how it's learned. Bookstores are filled with stories of great leaders and what they did in certain situations, but nothing about how they got there. There's precious little written about the how of leadership and certainly no notable discourse representing it. It's as if we know what we're aiming for, and we know when it's present, but we don't know how to get there.

This book is about learning the human side of leadership. It's informed by a lifelong passion for learning and more than three decades of studying how people excel and achieve mastery. This hasn't been an academic pursuit of poring over texts but working closely with leaders and leaders-to-be in a wide variety of organizations. This includes the senior leadership of the Marine Corps (including the Commandant and Assistant Commandant), the command staff of the Special Operations Command, Navy Admirals, a multitude of executives from large multinational corporations such as AT&T, Microsoft, Citibank, Pfizer, British Petroleum, Cisco, Hewlett- Packard, Cemex, and American Express; and national utilities, nonprofits, and small technological start-ups in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

Working in these different environments, I realized that leadership is something that can be learned, and it's generated in relationship with others. Exemplary leadership is not a thing-the correct genes, an appointment, a technique, or the chance of the draw that favors one individual over another. Exemplary leadership is a way of being, whether you're leading others or leading your own life.
Leadership can be developed; it's a choice and an option. It's a skill and art that can be developed through commitment and practice. Leadership is about living our purpose while engaging deeply with others. The Leadership Dojo is a place, an operational distinction, a community, and a set of practices that produces exemplary leaders.

In the Leadership Dojo, leaders and managers learn to embody and live their full potential.


Chapter 1 - We Are All Leaders (pgs 9-10)
On a recent trip to Tanzania, I had the opportunity to walk with a small band of Hadza, a hunter-gatherer tribe who live a preagricultural existence, as their ancestors did a hundred thousand years ago. The Hadza have virtually no material possessions and they live a nomadic existence. Moving lightly across the African landscape, they rarely spend more than ten days in one spot as they follow migratory routes and the weather in their search for food. They forage for berries, roots, tubers, and honey, all the while keen-eyed for the game they shoot with poison-tipped arrows. They live uncomplicated lives in a direct relationship with the natural world.

One morning as we walked a wooded ridge, one of the men pointed out a small gnarled bush and initiated an animated conversation between the men and women. After some discussion the women began to dig around the root system for the nutritious tubers it produces. While the women broke the ground with digging sticks, the men smoked and engaged in conversation, occasionally kibitzing and offering suggestions to the women's efforts. At one point, as the women were seated in the three-foot hole they had dug, pulling at the thick tubers, one of the members of our group jokingly remarked to the men, "I see you let the women do all the hard work." Unaware of the implied humor of the Western notion of equal rights, a Hadza male replied in a serious tone, "No, we all learn how to do everything. Everybody's a leader. If something happened to her we have to know how to do this, or we'd die."

"Everybody's a leader. We all learn how to do everything." The idea seemed to ricochet off the blistering African sky. The light brightened and the world expanded while everything in it became more lucid. I looked at our small group: educated, well informed, decent, upper-middle-class professionals who, by the standards of the larger world, had achieved considerable success in their lives. They had all become successful leaders by focusing their energies into one field, achieving expertise by narrowing themselves into a specific, well-defined career. As specialists they had become efficient in a single activity. While specific technical achievements had been won, along with a marketable identity, the greater view that included meaning and purpose had been lost. In many ways that's why we were in East Africa: to see how others lived, to see how else to lead our lives and learn new ways of leading.


Chapter 2 - The Cultivation of Self (pgs 25-26)
Leaders cultivate the self in order to better serve others. There is a long and rich tradition that goes back thousands of years in both the East and the West that spells out a path of selfmastery that is designed to serve the greater good. This is not a path of self-aggrandizement, but one in which we grow and transform ourselves in order to contribute to a vision larger than our petty desires. Consider Plato speaking more than two centuries ago: "We will be better and braver if we engage and inquire than if we indulge in the idle fancy that we already know or that it is of no use seeking to know what we do not know."

In the path of self-cultivation, the emphasis is not concerned with "getting better," fixing oneself, or indulging one's ego, but performing with mastery. Self-esteem training concerns itself with producing positive self-regard. This is a process through which one feels better about oneself, which is important, but it may not necessarily lead to new actions or improved performance. It's also a slippery slope in that "self-feeling" can easily be disconnected from service to others. The leadership path of self-cultivation is concerned with developing leaders who embody the ethics of individual responsibility, social commitment, and a moral and spiritual vision. It's a rigorous discipline that has its roots in two ancient traditions from the East and the West.

In the Western tradition, Aristotle, in Rhetoric, speaks of ethos, a type of leadership that is "a form of influence that causes other people to change their values and so their performance of tasks."

He goes on to explain that ethos is a leadership virtue distinct from rhetoric or persuasive language. Ethos is not what a person says or promises, but it's her way of being in the world, a presence and comportment that effects others to follow her and to be open to her ideas. Here the words of William Shakespeare come to mind: "By my actions, teach my mind." Ethos implies that the fundamental and distinguishing elements of an individual's character, as observed in the person's countenance, has the power to mobilize and change another's outlook and performance. When someone is the embodiment of ethos, those around him act with purpose and conviction. Ethos is not simply an intellectual principle of character, but a living body presence. As Eric Fromm said, "Ideas do not influence (men) deeply when they are only taught as ideas and thoughts.. But, ideas do have an effect (on men) if the idea is lived by the one who teaches it; if it is personified by the teacher, if the idea appears in the flesh."3 In this state a person has the courage to take a stand for what she cares about as well as the flexibility to adapt to a changing world. It is the opposite of pathos, which arouses one's pity and sympathy. Ethos arouses respect, mobilization, and action.

In the Eastern tradition, shugyo consists of two Chinese characters, "to master" and a "practice." Literally, then, it means to "master a practice." In everyday language, however, it is understood as self-cultivation. In this tradition the goal is to discipline one's spirit, or character, by using one's body.


Chapter 4 - You Are What You Practice (pgs 55 & 56)
In the mid-1950s an up-and-coming sportscaster named Howard Cosell interviewed Carl Furillo, the right fielder for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Cosell began the interview by describing Furillo in glowing terms as the master of the right field at Ebbets Field, the Dodger home stadium. The right field at Ebbets, with the odd angles of the outfield wall, was notorious for its difficulty to play. With obvious reverence for the older and well-known Furillo, Cosell asked, "This is such a difficult fence to play, Carl. No one else can even come close to playing it as well as you can. How did you ever learn to do it?"

Furillo looked at him strangely, shrugged his shoulders, and replied as if he were speaking to an idiot, "I friggin' practiced!" The message is clear: To get good at something, it's necessary to practice.

Carl Furillo knew that his expertise was hard earned. It wasn't magic, a gift from the gods, good luck, or wishful thinking that made him the baseball player that he was. As an all-star veteran who was out on the field every day the answer was easy: practice. Compare this with a recent ad on television that promotes weight loss with the promise that "you don't have to change your life, you only have to take a pill." We live in a culture that sells the quick fix, instant gratification, and get it all right now, on a daily basis. While we may understand, at least intellectually, the importance of practice when we casually comment to our children that it's necessary to practice when learning to play the piano, type, write in cursive, or drive a car, it's largely an idea that's unexamined, especially in the domain of leadership...


Chapter 6 - Leadership Presence (pgs 117 & 118)
In his groundbreaking book Silent Messages, Albert Mehrabian, professor emeritus of psychology at UCLA, asked the question, "What makes someone credible?" or "Why do we trust someone?" In his study, people stated that the believability of someone's message was influenced 7 percent by content, 38 percent by voice tone and tempo, and 55 percent by body language.1 Variations on this study, which was conducted with two separate audiences over a period of two years, has been replicated numerous times since, with varying populations, by other researchers over three decades. Every study, with only slight differences, arrived at the same results. If we consider that from a somatic perspective, voice tone and tempo fall into the category of body, we can conclude that 93 percent of building trust and credibility is communicated through the body.

This is startling in its frankness; at the same time it intuitively makes sense to us if we inventory our personal experience. Most of us can recall a time when we've moved forward with someone simply because the way we felt about him or how we sensed him; perhaps there was something about the way he comported himself, however ineffable, that made us trust him, and therefore want to interact with him more fully. If we are at all sensitive to the critical importance of trust in human relations, the percentages presented require us to seriously exam their implications. To begin with, they reveal that how we are is far more influential and expressive than what we're saying. They tell us that our presence is language and there is always sensitivity to who we are at a cellular and energetic level. They point out that humans first seek to trust the person rather than the message and that coherence between the message and the person is essential. And from this we can conclude that when we are our message, when we embody our values, we are at the height of our power and influence. It reveals that our presence, our way of being, is the foundation for building trust, intimacy, and connection with others. In the Leadership Dojo, we say that this presence is the ground upon which exemplary leadership is built.