Leadership
Last week, Martin Luther King, Jr. would have turned 90. While it is customary to look to our elders for sage advice, King knew that he was walking a path of imminent danger, but that his words could not be silenced by a bullet. Before his assassination at age 39, King reached deep within himself to find messages that would ring as clear and true today as they did during the turbulent times in which he was called to lead.
Here are 12 quotes from 1960 (at age 31) to 1969 (the night before he was killed eight years later) that are part of Dr. King’s enduring legacy.
1. In the final analysis, the question will be, “What did you do for others?” (Three Dimensions of a Complete Life, Sermon delivered in Pasadena, CA, February 28, 1960.)
2. I am convinced that men hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don’t know each other, and they don’t know each other because they don’t communicate with each other, and they don’t communicate with each other because they are separated from each other. (Lecture given at Cornell College, Mount Vernon, Iowa, October 15, 1962.)
3. History has proven that social systems have a great last-minute breathing power, and the guardians of the status quo are always on hand with their oxygen tents to keep the old order alive. (Ibid.)
4. We often end up with the high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. (Ibid.)
5. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair. (Letter from a Birmingham Jail, written while in solitary confinement after being arrested on charges of violating Alabama’s law against mass public demonstrations, April 16, 1963.)
6. Even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. (I Have A Dream, Address given at the March on Washington, August 28, 1963.)
7. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. (Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech in Oslo, Norway, December 11, 1964.)
8. We must learn to live together as brothers — or perish together as fools. (Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution, Commencement Address for Oberlin College, June 1965.)
9. A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus. (Domestic Impact of the War, Speech before National Labor Leadership Assembly for Peace, November 1967.)
10. I have decided to stick to love…Hate is too great a burden to bear. (Where Do We Go From Here?, Address delivered at the 11th Annual SCLC Convention, August 1967.)
11. Everybody can be great because everybody can serve. (The Drum Major Instinct, Sermon given at Ebenezer Baptist Church, February 4, 1968, two months before his assassination.)
12. Either we go up together, or we go down together. (I’ve Been to the Mountaintop, Speech given at the Mason Temple, Memphis, TN, April 3, 1968, the night before his death.)
The last words of King’s speech at the Mason Temple were borrowed from The Battle Hymn of the Republic, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” At his funeral, his wife, Coretta, completed the stanza that King had been too overcome by emotion to add, “His truth is marching on.”
Question: Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Is it time to break your silence about something that matters?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
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Purpose
If your faith in leadership is at an all time low, you might be heartened to learn about some of the youngest among us who are stepping up and taking action. These young leaders had a dream and let nothing stand in their way to make a positive impact. Their inspiring stories remind us that lack of experience, age, and money are not permanent barriers, but temporary challenges.
1. Shubham Banerjee
Age: 17
Purpose-Driven Enterprise: Braigo Labs, Inc.
Positive Impact: Banerjee turned his 7th grade science fair project into a business that offers low-cost Braille printers to help the visually impaired. The latest model uses Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to automatically print text from a website and translate it into Braille.
2. Haile Thomas
Age: 18
Purpose-Driven Enterprise: The HAPPY (Healthy, Active, Positive, Purposeful Youth) Organization
Positive Impact: HAPPY works to improve the health and wellness of underserved children by implementing programs that teach the importance of nutrition and healthy lifestyles.
3. Moziah Bridges
Age: 17
Purpose-Driven Enterprise: Mo’s Bows Memphis
Positive Impact: Mo’s handcrafted bow tie business started at the age of 9 at his grandmother’s kitchen table in South Memphis that has become an internationally recognized brand. Its foundation provides youth leadership skills through entrepreneurship.
4 and 5. Katherine and Isabelle Adams
Ages: 11 and 14
Purpose-Driven Enterprise: Paper for Water
Positive Impact: In 2011, sisters Katherine and Isabelle Adams learned that millions of people don’t have access to clean drinking water, and that girls their age have to haul water instead of going to school. They decided to raise $500 selling handmade origami ornaments and use that money to help fund a well in Ethiopia. Today, Paper For Water has raised more than $1 million for 150 water projects in 14 countries.
6. Mari Copeny
Age: 11
Purpose-Driven Enterprise: Dear Flint Kids Project
Positive Impact: Copeny is an advocate for her hometown of Flint, Michigan, which has been fighting a life-threatening water crisis since 2014. When she was 8 years old, she wrote a powerful letter to President Obama on behalf of Flint and its children. Obama replied to Copeny, visited Flint, and eventually signed off on $100 million in funding to help repair the city’s poisoned water system. Copeny has since founded the Dear Flint Kids Project and raised more than $10,000 for students in her community.
7. Henry Patterson
Age: 14
Purpose-Driven Enterprise: Not Before Tea
Positive Impact: Not Before Tea is a British children’s lifestyle brand, based on the Adventures of Sherb and Pip, a story written by Patterson when he was 10 years old. The book sold thousands of copies when it was first published in 2014. Not Before Tea, launched in the same year, is the fastest growing children’s lifestyle brand in the UK. The environmentally-friendly collection uses organic fabrics, FCS accredited paper from sustainable sources, and avoids plastics where possible.
8. Jakhil Jackson
Age: 11
Purpose-Driven Enterprise: Project I Am
Positive Impact: Project I Am was founded by Jakhil Jackson at the age of 8 after helping his aunt distribute goods to the homeless population in Chicago. Since then, volunteers have distributed approximately 15,000 “Blessing Bags” filled with wipes, socks, deodorant, hand sanitizer, granola bars, toothbrushes, toothpaste, bottled water, and more, in cities throughout the U.S. and around the world.
9. Paloma Rambana
Age: 13
Purpose-Driven Enterprise: Paloma’s Dream
Positive Impact: Rambana was born visually impaired and underwent two surgeries to create pupils when she was less than a year old. But when she entered the first grade in Tallahassee, Florida, she realized that not everyone with sight issues had her advantages. After talking to her parents about her concerns, she learned about a gap in Florida state funding for kids her age. She lobbied the state government and launched Paloma’s Dream which helped secure $1.25 million for programs to cover the gap. Today, she’s advocating for more state money and has asked Congress to set aside at least $1 billion for special education programs for visually impaired, deaf, and blind children across the country.
10. Liam Hannon
Age: 12
Purpose-Driven Enterprise: Liam’s Lunches of Love
Positive Impact: Liam makes and distributes homemade lunches with the help of family and friends to his homeless neighbors in Cambridge, Massachusetts. What started as a way to stay busy during summer break when he was 10 has turned into Liam’s Lunches of Love through which over 2,000 hand packed lunches have been distributed in brown paper bags decorated with inspiring messages.
We can complain about the state of leadership today, or, like the young people featured here, do something about making the world a better place. In Liam’s words during his interview as a CNN Young Wonder, “Start small, get help from friends, and do something that you love.”
Question: If these kids can trade a few play dates and video games to make a positive impact, where can some of your free time be spent to make a positive impact on others?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
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Leadership
Over the past 10 years, I have been honored to explore and debate the essence of power with Dr. Tony Baron. Specifically, how power impacts leadership, how leadership impacts culture, and, ultimately, how culture impacts performance.
With a double doctorate in psychology and theology and decades of executive coaching experience with Fortune 100 companies, you can imagine the depth and breadth that Tony adds to the subject. We are currently co-authoring a book that combines Tony’s scholarship and my straight talk about the challenges faced by today’s leaders. Meanwhile, I will be sharing guest posts by Tony from time to time to give you a taste of what it’s like to have an amazing colleague and friend like Tony Baron. – Sheri Nasim
Fake news. Truthiness. Alternative facts. Terms like these are used daily on our 24-hour infotainment channels. With the veracity of news media, coupled with algorithms that determine what news spreads, and even the capability to create digital doppelgangers of politicians and celebrities, confidence in our ability to assess reality correctly has never been more shaken.
Yet, long before the 21st century, leaders have struggled with their ability to assess reality correctly. In his book, Tribes, Seth Godin explains that, for centuries, “[Kings have] traditionally surrounded themselves with a well-fed and well-paid court of supplicants, each of whom has a vested interest in keeping things as they are.” Today’s leaders don’t need supplicants, they need counselors.
Here are ten suggestions for how to assess reality correctly when you’re the leader:
1. Seek counsel from those who are directly involved with the presenting problem.
2. Seek counsel from those who have presented past decisions correctly.
3. Seek counsel from those who have nothing to gain personally from the decision.
4. Seek counsel from those who desire a balance between profit, people, and planet.
5. Seek counsel from those who respond and not react to the problem.
6. Gather as much information as possible from a wide variety of resources.
7. Ask yourself if the people who offer advice are giving you the pros and cons of the decision, or if they are minimizing the pros and cons.
8. Seek what is morally good in the decision process:
a. Look for the objective good
b. Look for the primary intention of doing the good
c. Does the decision benefit all the key stakeholders?
9. Determine if the decision calls for a command decision, consultation decision, or a consensus decision to be successful in seeking reality.
10. Don’t allow yourself to get caught up in the tyranny of the urgent. Pause and think through the unintended consequences of the decision.
Your team is looking to you as a model for assessing reality correctly. Practice getting counsel, rather than information, and focus on decision quality, rather than quantity.
Question: What are you doing to make sure your decisions are based in reality?
Dr. Tony Baron is Distinguished Scholar-In-Residence at Center for Executive Excellence and an internationally recognized speaker, writer, corporate consultant, professor and the San Diego Director of Azusa Pacific University Graduate School of Theology.
Dr. Baron is the author of six books, including The Art of Servant Leadership and a workbook manual co-written with noted author and business leader Ken Blanchard. Throughout his career, he has worked with hundreds of companies including Ford Motor Company, Coca Cola Company, Warner Brothers Studios, and Boeing, among many others.
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
Purpose
Welcome to another year, and another round of jokes about not keeping New Year’s resolutions. To-wit: The 13 funniest tweets about New Year’s resolutions.
All joking aside, those who will make this year a true success are not focused on their New Year’s resolutions – about what they will start doing or stop doing. Instead, they are focused on their why. They’ve taken the time to connect the dots of who they are with what they do. And that is a very powerful motivator.
This year, don’t resolve to do two or three small things differently. Instead, take the time to connect with your why. What can you do to make an enduring impact? Here are three simple questions to get you started.
1. What did you want to be before the world ‘should’ on you? You know. “You should go into accounting.” “You should take over your father’s law practice.” “You should study medicine.” As Mark Albion writes in More Than Money, “It’s easy to slide into a career that matches your skills but not your deepest desires. When you get good at something you don’t want to do, you feel as if you’re dying a little bit each day – that your soul is being sucked out of you. Worse yet, it takes time to realize what’s going on.”
2. What did you want to do when you were eleven or twelve? In Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham suggests that we remember our ‘yearnings’. He writes, “Perhaps because of your genes, or your early experiences, as a child you found yourself drawn to some activities and repelled by others. While your brother was chasing his friends around the yard, you settled down to tinker with the sprinkler head, pulling it apart so that you could figure out how it worked. Your analytical mind was already making its presence known.” Your purpose is hiding right beneath the surface of your life. It threads between the major events of your life and opens windows of opportunity.
3. What legacy do you want to leave? Author Michael Gerber takes this idea to an extreme in his book, The E-Myth Revisited. He asks that you imagine attending your own funeral. All of your friends, your family, and your business associate are there. Picture yourself lying in the box in the center of the room, then listen. Imagine what your colleagues would say about you. Would they talk about the margins you gained? The deals you closed? The efficiencies you implemented? Or, would they talk about the value you left behind? How you helped them grow? How they are better off because they knew you? Starting today, you have the power to shape these conversations.
Rather than rushing to the gym or buying an organizer, take some time this month to connect with your why. There’s no passion to be found in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living. Find your passion. Connect with your why. Work on purpose.
Question: Do you know someone who is guided by a clear sense of purpose? What differences do you see in their daily behavior?
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Leadership
It’s been quite a year and it’s hard to believe 2018 is almost over. But before we dive into 2019, we took a look back at which of this year’s posts got the most social media traffic – a combination of likes, comments and shares. The most popular posts covered how to lead yourself, either by communicating with curiosity or keeping your ego in check and being aware of your own triggers. Then there are the lists. Two out of the top ten are lists of leadership books (even one from children’s classics!) that we thought were worth the turn of the page.
Regardless of the nature of each post, we tried to find a lesson or two that you could take away in 750 words or less. Something you could apply at the office that day, or that might slightly sharpen your skills as a leader.
Here are the ten posts that we hope served that purpose:
10. Doing Well By Doing Good: 12 Companies that Got it Right in 2018
The best organizations today understand that culture is their strongest asset and can be the glue to retaining top talent. Whether you nurture it or not, you have a culture. It may be empowering or toxic. Either way, the results are showing up on your bottom line. Here are the 12 companies we featured in CEE News this year that show how doing well and doing good are not mutually exclusive… [Read More]
9. 7 Leadership Books to Add to Your Holiday Wish List
The dizzying news cycles and political divisiveness of this year can be enough to leave the strongest among us searching for answers. Turning to a meaty book on leadership, culture, or how to maintain clarity in a world of toxicity can be an excellent way to recharge your leadership batteries. If you’re not sure which books to add to your holiday wish list this year, here are some fresh titles to consider… [Read More]
8. The Culture Equation: 3 Critical Factors You Can’t Ignore
Though many have tried, no one has ever landed on a fixed, universal definition for organizational culture. The subject has been vigorously debated from the pages of the Harvard Business Review to the halls of MIT Sloan. What is not debated is that culture is part of the DNA of every organization. Whether your organizational culture is empowering or toxic depends greatly on two factors: shared experience and modeled leadership. If the leaders of the organization are fixated on business development, channel expansion, and market domination, they are not likely spending any time intentionally trying to shape the culture. Unintentionally, however, they are sending very clear signals about what is important to them. They are the cultural architects of your organization and contribute these three very important things to the culture equation… [Read More]
7. 5 Takeaways After 5 Years as CEO of a Leadership Consulting Firm
Taking you from what is to what is possible. That has been our core purpose since Center for Executive Excellence was founded on this day in 2013. Since launching our firm five years ago, we have served more than 300 clients, built a social media following of over 20,400, posted 155 blogs, and published 30 articles in Forbes and Huffington Post. If you’ve been part of our journey over the years, thank you. We have been honored to provide you with information and insights along the way to help you grow yourself and your team. While our firm’s numbers are impressive, it’s the numbers that I have logged in the role as CEO of Center for Executive Excellence that I want to share. As I reflect over the past five years, here are some nuggets that I have collected in my role… [Read More]
6. Herstory: 4 Women Who Changed the World
Picture a leader. Do you see a woman? If not, you aren’t alone. A recent study published in the Academy of Management Journal confirms that getting recognized as a leader is more difficult for women than for men. Yet, history is filled with women who defied the norms, like the four women below who persisted in claiming their leadership role – though you may have never heard of them. 1. Eliza Scidmore, First Female Writer, Photographer and Editor of National Geographic. When she began her career as a journalist, Eliza Scidmore (pronounced “Sid-more”) submitted articles using only her initials to avoid the common bias of her day against female journalists. Her passion for travel took her to the Alaskan frontier in 1883… [Read More]
5. 6 Lessons From Children’s Books to File Under “Leadership”
Just because we get older doesn’t mean that the lessons from the pages of children’s books are any less relevant. In fact, re-reading some of those passages may prove more poignant and fitting in our adult years. Here are six children’s books worth turning back to for lasting lessons in leadership. 1. The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams. What it’s about: The Velveteen Rabbit, a newcomer to the nursery, begins his journey to become real – through the love of a child. The leadership gem: “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or who have to be carefully kept.”… [Read More]
4. Stone Brewing: A Case Study in Culture and Values Alignment
When organizations underperform, leaders often try to fix the problem by shuffling people around or investing in new technology. But when its culture and values are misaligned, no amount of shuffling or software will address the underlying problem. So, how do you create a set of core values that will help align your employees and drive performance? In 2015, Greg Koch and Steve Wagner, the Co-Founders of Stone Brewing, came to us after enjoying 20 straight years of success. After hearing us speak at a leadership event, they realized that they had been so focused on survival followed by scalable growth that they had neglected their culture. “We needed our inside to match our outside,” as Steve Wagner put it. Here’s how we worked with Stone Brewing to create a culture of performance… [Read More]
3. Triggered? Rewire Your Brain in 3 Easy Steps
Power causes brain damage. If you’ve ever had a former friend get promoted then develop a case of colleague amnesia, you know this to be true. Or, if you saw the sorry, not sorry, congressional hearing of now-former Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf for failing to stop some 5,000 employees from setting up phony accounts for customers, you’ve seen it in living color. At times like these, you may wonder, “What was going through their head?” Research suggests that the better question may be: What wasn’t going through it? Historian Henry Adams described power as “a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.” According to research by Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, that’s not far from the truth… [Read More]
2. 3 Ways Humble Leaders Keep their Egos in Check
Today’s leaders face increasingly complex problems. No one person can have all of the answers. That’s why leaders of the 21st century must have the humility to encourage feedback. To step back and create space for others to show you your blind spots and help you make improvements that count. Harvard Business Review contributors John Dame and Jeffrey Gedmin called this intellectual humility. “Without humility,” the authors argue, “you’re not able to learn.” Here are three principles of humility that will help put you in a feedback frame of mind… [Read More]
1. 10 Ways to Talk to Someone You Disagree With
Unfriend anyone on Facebook lately? Avoiding someone because you’re afraid that the subject of politics, religion, or even the weather will come up? In a world that is growing more polarized by the day, there may be no more important skill than being able to hold a meaningful conversation with another human being. In order to free yourself from filter bubbles, radio host and TEDx speaker Celeste Headlee suggests ten ways to improve your conversation skills… [Read More]
It’s been an honor to share our thoughts with you this year. We truly appreciate your comments, your likes, and your shares. We look forward to continuing the conversation in 2019.
Question: What thought leaders did you follow most in 2018? Did you learn anything that helped you become a better leader?
