30 Overlooked Acts of Leadership Courage by Asmus

30 Overlooked Acts of Leadership Courage
http://www.aspire-cs.com/30-overlooked-acts-of-leadership-courage

June 14th, 2011 Author: Mary Jo Asmus

We often think of leaders as exhibiting big acts of courage – overcoming huge obstacles and saving lives, metaphorically and literally. Yet I’m amazed and humbled at the courageous things leaders do that we don’t think of as brave. The small courageous things that we overlook every day are the stuff that make up the character of great leaders.

You exhibit leadership courage daily in a lot of unnoticed ways like these when you:

Speak up when you know you’ll be judged harshly.
Shut up and let others have their say even if you think you are right.
Give critical feedback to someone in power when you know it might have unfavorable consequences.
Receive critical feedback from others with grace.
Develop others without fear even when you know they may become smarter than you are.
Be kind to those who disagree with you because they might teach you something.
Coach and mentor others even if it’s not part of your job description.
Say no when everyone else is saying yes.
Say yes when everyone else is saying no.
Accept responsibility for the shameful or embarrassing things you’ve done.
Take the high road when you know how difficult it can be.
Walk away when the fight isn’t worth it.
Stay and fight for the greater good when everyone else is running away from it.
Reflect deeply when you really just want to take action.
Love your followers even when you’re unhappy with them.
Forgive others’ failures when you know they’ve learned an important lesson.
Give others credit even when you’d like to take it for yourself.
Keep going when the going gets really, really tough.
Connect with your heart when your head wants to rule.
Connect with your head when your emotions are threatening to take over.
Ask “what’s right” when you prefer to be critical.
Be curious when you’d rather be judgmental.
Step out of your comfort zone when you hate stepping out or being uncomfortable.
Listen to others deeply, without giving advice.
Ask when you really want to tell.
Do things a different way even though it’s “always been done this way”.
See the potential in others when everyone else sees what’s wrong with them.
Admit your failings when you think you’re supposed to be perfect.
Control your impulses and desires when the temptation is greatest.
Reduce suffering because you can.

What unexpected acts of courage will you act upon today?

Business Leader Quotes

As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.
Bill Gates

For the wise man, one human life is sufficient, and the stupid man will not know what to do with eternity.
William Shirer, a favorite quote of Bernard Rapoport

Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success.
Henry Ford

I don't have to work hard, but we are changing China. It's not how much money you make, it's how you change society.
Jack Ma (As quoted in Barron's 6 June 2011)

Rapoport is a cheerful workaholic, a chronic optimist, a tennis nut, and an avid bibliophile who can't quite understand why other people don't get as much of a thrill out of working as he does.
Jim Wright on Bernard Rapoport (in Being Rapoport)

Strong people have sound ideas and the force to make these ideas effective.
Andrew Mellon

When you work twenty hours a day, when do you have time to develop friends who are not in the business?
Lee Iacocca (Iacocca, chapter 10)

There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that this will work. It is one characteristics of a leader that he not doubt for one moment the capacity of the people he is leading to realize whatever he is dreaming. Imagine if Martin Luther King said "I have a dream. But I am not sure if they are up to it."
Benjamin Zander, TED Conference 2008

Top Scientists, from Simmons The Scientific 100

The Top Twenty-Five

1. Issac Newton and the Newtonian Revolution
2. Albert Einstein and Twentieth-Century Science
3. Neils Bohr and the Atom
4. Charles Darwin and Evolution
5. Louis Pasteur and the Germ Theory of Disease
6. Sigmund Freud and Psychology of the Unconscious
7. Galileo Galilei and the New Science
   
8. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier and the Revolution in Chemistry
9. Johannes Kepler and Motion of the Planets
10. Nicolaus Copernicus and the Heliocentric Universe
11. Michael Faraday and the Classical Field Theory
12. James Clerk Maxwell and the Electromagnetic Field
13. Claude Bernard and the Founding of Modern Physiology
14. Franz Boas and Modern Anthropology
15. Werner Heisenberg and Quantum Theory
16. Linus Pauling and Twentieth-Century Chemistry
17. Rudolf Virchow and the Cell Doctrine
18. Erwin Schrodinger and Wave Mechanics
    
19. Ernest Rutherford and the Structure of the Atom
20. Paul Dirac and Quantum Electrodynamics
21. Andreas Vesalius and the New Anatomy
22. Tycho Brahe and the New Astronomy
23. Comte de Buffon and l'Histoire Naturelle
24. Ludwig Boltzmann and Thermodynamics
25. Max Plank and the Quanta
26. Marie Curie and Radioactivity

From John Simmons, The Scientific 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Scientists, Past and Present (Secaucus NJ, Citadel Press, 1996)

Suggested Science Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin

--Hard To Be a God by Strugatski Brothers
--Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick
--Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch
--The Invincible by Stanislaw Lem
--The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe
--The Dream Master by Roger Zelazny
--The Exile Waiting by Vonda N. McIntyre
--And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees by Michael Bishop
--The Non-Existent Knight by Italo Calvino
--The Cloven Viscount by Italo Calvino
--The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino

As told by Kim Stanley Robinson in an untitled chapter in 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin edited by Karen Joy Fowler and Debbie Notkin (Seattle, Aqueduct Press, 2010)

Philosophy and Old Texts

Quote:

There is nothing to stop us from lifting a sentence from an old text and seeing what it can do for us now. If we want to lift the thought, not just the sentence, we may have to put some work into deciding what the sentence meant. If we aren't prepared to do that we shouldn't expect too much of it, and we certainly shouldn't disparage its author if we don't get too much from it. But given that precaution we will often find it relevant to our concerns, because much philosophy arises from facts about human beings and human life which are pretty stable -- at any rate they haven't changed much over the last 3,000 years.

From Edward Craig, Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (New York, Oxford University Press, 2002)

A Shadow in the City by Charles Bowden, good quote

(an undercover cop thinking about his rules for working smart)

Be yourself, Sonrisa advises. Never stance, never lie about yourself. Just be yourself. Don't pretend to be more than you are, people will smell the fraud coming off you. Don't be tough, just be natural. If you are reading some cookbook, then you are the guy reading a cookbook. Don't pretend to be reading something else. Because the trick in this world of deals and frauds and rip-offs is this: Be trustworthy. Be natural. Don't talk about yourself, don't tell others anything, absolutely nothing, that they don't need to know for the deal. But given this curtain of privacy, still be natural and open. If you do not drink, then refuse the drink. If you do not like t**** bars, say so. If you don't know shit about bikes, admit it. And for God's sake, don't pretend to be some tough guy because in the room someone eventually will test your claim.

Chapter 2
A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior
by Charles Bowden
San Diego, Harcourt, Inc., 2005

Favorite Quotes for 2011

Curiosity demands that we ask questions, that we try to put things together and try to understand this multitude of aspects as perhaps resulting from the actions of a relatively small number of elemental things and forces acting in an infinite variety of combination.
--Richard Feynman

Luxury lies not in richness and ornateness but in the absence of vulgarity.
--Coco Chanel

A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.
--Martin Luther King, Jr.

That's what Tolstoy meant in War and Peace when he talked about the unknown "x," that spirit that enables people to do things that just aren't reasonable to others.
--Bernard Rapoport

The Word for World is Forest does what serious science fiction does best. It shows us our own world, made strange and familiar; makes us feel the beauty and mystery of this totally extraordinary (one of a kind, you know) planet. And rails against abuses, not in polemic speeches, but though the focused lens of a simple, tragic drama. It's a minor masterpiece.
--Gwyneth Jones on Ursula K. Le Guin (from 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin)

If you break the little promises you'll break the big ones. That's what you said.
--Cormac McCarthy, The Road

I am a trichotomist. By that I mean, when I'm in business, I'm a predator and, I hope, a civilized one; when I'm charitable, I'm philanthropic; but when I'm in politics, I'm idealistic.
--Bernard Rapoport

Alas, Babylon quote: Bold People

Josh Hickingbottom got me a cool novel, "Alas, Babylon," by Pat Frank from 1959.

Good quote about people need to get through a crisis:

"Bold people, audacious people, tenacious people. Impatient, odd ball people . . . Ruthless people who will fire the deadheads and a**-kissers. Impatient, odd-ball me like [Admiral] Rickover pounding desks for his atomic subs. Rude people who will tell the unimaginative, business-as usual, seven-carbon sons of b**** to go take a jump at a galloping goose."

Thanks. Josh. Merry Christmas.

A few good quotes and connections

Charlie Black, a freshman from University of Texas, happened to go see Louis Armstrong at a club in 1931. He knew nothing of jazz and never heard of Louis Armstrong.

“He played mostly w/ his eyes closed. Letting flow from that inner space of music things that had never existed.

He was the first genius I’d ever seen. It is impossible to underestimate the significance of a 16 year old southern boy seeing genius for the first time in a black person.

We literally never saw a black man in anything but a servants capacity.

Louis opened my eyes wide and put to me a choice: Blacks, the saying went, were ‘all right in their place’, but what was the place of such a man, and of the people from which he sprung?’”

Charles L. Black

Excerpt from Ken Burns’ Jazz Documentary

Charles L. Black went on to become a distinguished teacher of Constitutional Law at Yale and in 1954 was on the team of lawyers to convince the Supreme Court in Brown vs. Board of Education that segregating school children on the basis of race and color was unconstitutional.

Thanks to Scott Elkin for transcribing: http://scottelkin.com/music/charles-l-black-on-louis-armstrong/comment-page-1/#comment-38323

In talking about Duke Ellington's Music in Ken Burn's Jazz, writer Stanley Crouch said:

"You know, if you can get to this, come on in, you know what I mean? ‘Cause that’s always in the music, in Duke Ellington’s music there’s always, “Hey, come on in, you know.” You know, all kinds of ways, come on in. Sometimes this, sometimes he’d grab you by the arm and say, “Come on in.” Sometimes, “Hey, why don’t you come on in here.” You know what I’m saying? Anything from those, you know he’s got those, you know he’s got that, it’s always that he’s always trying to pull you into something, you know. And it’s, so it’s got that, so there’s a kind of a welcoming quality that you associate with the highest form of civilization, I would suggest. See, because civilization in a certain sense can be reduced to the word welcome, you know, in some sense it can be that."

George Freidman, The Next 100 Years

Cultures live in one of three states. The first state is barbarism. Barbarians believe that the customs of their village are the laws of nature and that anyone who doesn't live the way they live is beneath contempt and requiring redemption or descruction. The third state is decadence decadents cynically believe that nothing is better than anything else. If they hold anyone in contempt, it is those who believe in anything. Nothing is worth fighting for.

Civilization is the second and most rare state. Civilized people are able to balance two contradictory thoughts in their minds. They believe that there are truths and theat their cultures approximate those truths. At the same time, they hold open in their mind the possibility that they are in error. The combination of belief and skepticism is inherently unstable. Cultures pass through barbarism to civilization and then to decadence as skepticism undermines self-certainty. Civilized people fight selectively but effectively. Obviously all cultures contain people who are barbaric, civilized, or decadent, but each culture is dominated at different times by one principle.

Thirty Methods of Influence--Covey

From Stephen Covey, Principle-Centered Leadership

1. Refrain from saying the unkind or negative thing.
2. Exercise patience with others.
3. Distinguish between the person and the behavior and the performance.
4. Perform anonymous service.
5. Chose the proactive response.
6. Keep the promises you make to others.
7. Focus on the circle of influence.
8. Live the law of love.
9. Assume the best of others.
10. Seek first to understand.
11. Reward open honest expression or questions.
12. Give an understanding response.
13. If offended, take the initiative.
14. Admit your mistakes, apologize, ask for forgiveness.
15. Let arguments fly out open windows.
16. Go one on one.
17. Renew your commitment to thing you have in common.
18. Be influenced by them first.
19. Accept the person and the situation.
20. Prepare your mind and heart before you prepare your speech.
21. Avoid fight or flight--talk through differences.
22. Recognize and take time to teach.
23. Agree on the limits, rules, expectations, and consequences.
24. Don't give up, and don't give in.
25. Be there at the crossroads.
26. Speak the language of logic and emotion.
27. Delegate effectively.
28. Involve people in meaningful projects.
29. Train them in the law of the harvest.
30. Let natural consequences teach responsible behavior.