Running the Human Race!

Winners are grinners. You're in it to win it. Go hard or go home. Eyes on the prize!

So what happens when you live life at this frenetic place? You will only gauge your success relative to those around you. And if you're a leader - a frenetic leader - you will only want to drive your team to achieve results, to beat the competition, to win. This is the accepted imperative of business. And it's killing us!

There is another way to run the human race. Not by being a frenetic leader, but by being a phronetic leader. Phonetic leaders embrace "phronesis" or practical wisdom, which is the virtuous habit of making decisions and taking actions that serve the common good. It is a capability to find the "right answer" in a particular context.

Phronesis, acquired from experience, enables leaders to make good judgements in a timely fashion and take actions guided by values and morals. When leaders distribute this kind of knowledge within their organisations, they can reach enlightened decisions.

The phronetic leader must still make judgements and take actions to sustain profitability. But he or she will do so while taking a higher point of view - what's good for society. According to Ijuro Nonaka, Director of the Research Centre for Practical Wisdom at Fujitsu Research Institute, there are six abilities required to be a phronetic leader:
  1. Wise leaders can judge goodness: Phronetic leaders practice moral discernment about what's good and act on it in every situation.
  2. Wise leaders can grasp the essence: Practical wisdom enables leaders to see the essence of the situation and intuitively assess the nature and meaning of people, things, and events. 
  3. Wise leaders create shared contexts: In Japan a ba (place, space, or field) refers to the context in which relationships are formed. Those participating in a ba share information, build short-term relationships, and try to create new meaning. 
  4. Wise leaders communicate the essence: Phronetic leaders communicate in a way that everyone can understand. They use stories, metaphors, and other figurative language that allows individuals with different experiences to grasp things intuitively.
  5. Wise leaders exercise political power: Phronetic leaders understand the viewpoints and emotions of others. They carefully consider timing - when to make a move or to discuss issues. They engage in dialectical thinking, which enables them to deal with contradictions, opposites, and paradoxes by moving to a higher level.
  6. Wise leaders foster practical wisdom in others: Practical wisdom must be distributed as much as possible throughout the organisation. Fostering distributed leadership is one of the wise leader's biggest responsibilities.
Running the human race is not about your track record. It's not a linear pathway to some wished-for future state. You can afford to make inductive jumps according to your ideals and dreams. If you aren't idealistic, you simply can't create new futures. But you must also be pragmatic - to see things as they really are, to grasp the essence of the situation, and to envision how it relates to the larger context. You can be phonetic, not frenetic, and judge what must be done in the moment to achieve the common good.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The 6 Factors of System 3 Thinking for Making Wise Decisions!

Image
Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, Daniel Kahneman, won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his work on system 1 and system 2 thinking in “Thinking, Fast and Slow” .  The idea that much of our thinking and decision-making is subconscious, and automatic (system 1), as opposed to rational and deliberate (system 2). But he missed the observation by Japanese theorists, Professor Emeritus Ikujiro Nonaka at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy, Hitotsubashi University, and Professor Hirotaka Takeuchi, of the Management Practice in the Strategy Unit of Harvard Business School that there is a third system . We typically rely on system 1 thinking because it’s automatic, fast, and experience-based. We use our innate or gut feel to quickly arrive at a decision that “feels right”. System 2 thinking is logical, rational, and fact-based. We use system 2 when we need to slow down and analyse the i
Read more

Patience, young grasshopper!

Image
"Patience, young grasshopper" is a quote from the 1970's Kung Fu TV series starring David Carradine as Kwai Chang Cain. His teacher, Master Po called him "grasshopper" as a child, emphasising patience as the ultimate martial arts skill. But we live in an era of high-speed, same-day, cutting-edge, first-to-market, fast-food, get-it-now, snap-judgement. If we're told we have to wait, we get irritated. If we can't come up with the right answer right away, we get upset. if someone or something gets in our way, we get angry. Why is patience considered one of the most powerful martial arts practices? Because patience is the antidote to anger, and anger represents the most terrible and destructive manifestation of self-driven desire. When we're angry with someone, we're estranged form them and from the true core of our being. We end up losing the very thing we believe we're fighting for. Patience is a discipline. It takes practice to over
Read more

The Allen Curve

Image
The  Allen curve  was discovered by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Thomas J. Allen in the late 1970s.   It represents the likelihood that any two people in the same office will communicate. For example, a  person is 10 times more likely to communicate with a colleague who sits at a neighbouring desk than with someone whop sits more than 50 metres away. Related research has discovered that t he highest performing employees – those with the most useful new ideas – were the ones who consistently engaged in the most interactions. “High performers consulted with anywhere from 4 to 9 organisational colleagues (on a given project), whereas low performers contacted 1 or 2 colleagues at most". Increasing the number of colleagues with whom an employee consults contributes independently to performance; people have more new ideas when they talk with more people. In another study, t he best traders were the most connected, and people who carried on more Instant
Read more