Leadership: Living in the Future vs. Business as Usual

November 7-9, 2012

The Fairmont, San Francisco

Our annual three-and-a-half-day institute equips women with the skills and strategies to effectively lead. Rising female leaders will learn to drive change, produce sustainable results and achieve their personal and professional best.

How often have clients of mine wished that their people could break free of the business-as-usual mentality. Business-as-usual is the enemy of both ground breaking, innovative thinking and exceptional performance. It stifles fresh initiative and high aspiration. And yet leaders all to often unknowingly capitulate to the seductive allure of “good enough.”

How do you raise your people’s consciousness about the crucial difference between leadership that inspires extraordinary results and that which merely sustains the current state? That is what this video clip is about.

It takes place during a Music Paradigm session held in Belgium in 2009. Prior to this excerpt I surprised the orchestra by asking them to play without any conductor on the podium. They intensified their communication, and managed to play quite beautifully without me. Then I asked them to make a different interpretation, and they could do that too. The video begins after I’ve selected a random participant to stand on the podium and hold the baton in her hand. She feels the way I move it and listens to the orchestra’s response. Then we discuss what it means.

This simple exercise demonstrates the courage required of conductors, and all leaders: the willingness to be the first one to commit to a purpose that exists only as an idea and has not yet taken on any concrete reality. Most of the people that you need to execute the plan will not at first be able to understand the vision that you have seen. But they will feel the force of your commitment. When they see you living in your imagined future they will be more willing to put themselves at risk for it. But, on the other hand, if you retreat from your purpose and align yourself with the present state your organization will gradually lose its energy, ambition and meaning.