When I was in college, I lived in a dorm that seemed to attract bats. It wasn't unusual to find the doors to the hallway and the lounge shut on a given evening, with some intrepid neighbor chasing the terrified animal around with a broom or a pillowcase.
Occasionally, too, you could swing a door open and find a resting bat, hanging upside down, snoozing or hanging out.
I tend to think of management gurus much the same way--if you rile him or her, he or she may get caught in your hair. But if you just leave the guru alone, you may find him or her snoozing upside down, peacefully.
Metaphor not working? Fine, but I can't get it out of my head, so it stays.
Anyway, I was intrigued by the feature in a recent HBS Working Knowledge that spotlights a book called Geeks & Geezers, which interviews people over 70 and people under 30 about leadership to find shared traits and trends.
Some people find these generation-based generalizations annoying, and they can be off the mark. But it's such a relief to read generalizations about my generation that don't focus exclusively on our spending or TV-watching habits, I went along for the ride.
There's also an interview with the authors and an excerpt from the book. The excerpt makes much out of notable leaders' ability to turn a bad situation into a good one, in the long run--lemonade from lemons, as it were. Viz:
In his 2001 memoir Vernon Can Read!, Jordan describes the vicious baiting he received as a young man from his employer, Robert F. Maddox. Jordan served the racist former mayor of Atlanta at dinner, in a white jacket, with a napkin over his arm. He also functioned as Maddox's chauffeur. Whenever Maddox could, he would derisively announce, "Vernon can read!" as if the literacy of a young African American were a source of wonderment. So abused, a lesser man might have allowed Maddox to destroy him. But Jordan wrote his own interpretation of Maddox's sadistic heckling, a tale that empowered Jordan instead of embittering him. When he looked at Maddox through the rear-view mirror, Jordan did not see a powerful member of Georgia's ruling class. He saw a desperate anachronism who lashed out because he knew his time was up.
This ability is important, the authors say, because it's adaptive. If you're able to adapt, you have a better chance of continuing to learn and change. "the model of leadership that we propose is also a theory of adult learning and development. Finding ways to live well grows ever more important as our life expectancies increase. Although some boomers are notoriously reluctant to face it, the prospect of a longer life increases the potential for suffering as well as joy.
So, what does our model tell us about both leading and living well? Both require learning how to learn. All our geeks and geezers devised their own learning strategies, applying their creativity to finding new ones at each new stage in their lives."
What does it mean? I'm still figuring it out. But somehow I thought it was important.
Posted at October 08, 2002 08:29 PM