• being genuinely oneself,
• being generous with other people and oneself, and
• being generative of good, beneficial work
• and other useful and/or provocative subjects

This month's quote:

One of the most alarming, cautionary tales for leaders I’ve ever read comes 
from the book “Longitude,” by Dava Sobel.  Sobel provides her readers with 
a thorough history of the extreme difficulty sailors experienced in trying 
to navigate correctly before the invention of a clock, in 1725, that would 
keep accurate time at sea (necessary to calculate precise longitude).  

The story I remember so well tells of Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell, the 
commander of a fleet of four British war ships, who had himself 
miscalculated the position of his fleet and on a dark October night in 1707 
and was bearing down, unknowingly, upon the rocks of the Scilly Isles.  One 
enlisted sailor—not an officer—was convinced either by his own navigational 
calculations (something that sailors were forbidden to do) or by the smell 
of burning kelp (which he, as a Scilly native, knew well to be a sign that 
the islands were very close indeed—accounts vary as to why this lowly 
sailor finally became desperate enough to approach the officers and declare 
his informed fears).  Sir Clowdisley and the other gentlemen were enraged 
that a lowly sailor would dare to make such an impertinent, insubordinate 
declaration.  The man was immediately hung from the yardarm for his crime; 
then within half an hour Clowdisley’s ship and the rest of the fleet 
crashed upon the rocks.  Among the 1500 sailors there were only 13 
survivors.  

Finding the right balance between top-down, directive leadership and 
bottom-up, participative leadership has always been a challenging dilemma.  


I encountered it twice on Saturday morning as I conducted a choir rehearsal 
for our Easter program.   First there was the comment by an alto that the 
Easter carol we were rehearsing seemed too slow—literally, she said: “it 
feels like this piece is dragging.”  I could have resisted this 
“insubordinate declaration,” but it was immediately apparent that she was 
right.  So much so that a new tempo and how to conduct it came immediately 
to mind.  We tried it on the spot, and the piece took on a whole new 
feeling—vastly improved by her suggestion.  

The second item was less of a challenge than an opportunity.  We were 
rehearsing a piece that one of the choir members had, when he himself was 
choir director, selected and conducted for an Easter program about 6 years 
ago.  Now he was singing tenor, without much prior rehearsal, and realized 
that he didn’t know the part—and the performance was to be the next day.  
“Paul, I’m having trouble with singing this—I’ve conducted it, but never 
sung it—so I’m wondering if you’d like to trade places with me for this 
number…”  I looked fleetingly at my wife’s face, and my daughter’s, got a 
mixed message, and made up my mind.  “Good idea, let’s try it.”  So Thom 
took the podium and I sang the tenor part.  It was the right decision.  

So, once in a while I get it right.  Or, as George Burns once said, “You 
win a few, you lose a lot.”  

It’s a walk on a tightrope:  to be in charge and to not be in charge at the 
same time.  And it’s very lively up there.  

************************************************************

A friend shared a story with me last week that I’d like to share with you.  


After months of frustration whenever he had to work with the company’s 
Chief Information Officer, my friend went to the CEO, his own boss’s boss, 
and said:  

“The CIO is a bozo; you’ve got to get rid of him.”

The CEO replied:  “You want to talk about bozos, let me tell you about ALL 
the bozos who work at the top of this company.”  He then described very 
succinctly and incisively the weaknesses AND the strengths of his entire 
10-person top team, including the CIO and also himself.   Then he said:  
“I’d love it if I could replace all of us with perfect people, but there 
don’t seem to be enough perfect people around.  So I’m making sure that 
none of us has responsibilities that, if we screwed up, it would wreck the 
company.  My job is to pull the strengths out of these people and tolerate 
their weaknesses.  And I know that, despite our imperfections, we can 
succeed.  Magellan sailed around the world with boats that were pretty 
badly battered up, but they made it.  We can, too.”  

And they did.  

I love the line about “not enough perfect people around.”  It’s a strong 
reminder that we’d better get used to dealing with flawed people, and that 
we should be grateful that others are also willing to deal with us and our 
imperfections just as we are.  Perhaps there’s a standard, unspoken 
agreement among people who work together successfully:  that they’ll do 
this—that they’ll not expect perfection from each other, even while their 
standards and expectations may be very high.  

Not expecting perfection doesn’t mean getting sloppy and too easy-going—and 
sometimes people just can’t meet the minimum of what’s necessary and have 
to go—but it does mean recognizing and being okay with the humanity of our 
associates, and of ourselves.  If we insist on always being right, on 
seeing things only from our own, righteous, “I am perfect” point of view, 
we break that implicit agreement and damage relationships that we 
desperately need in order to be productive--never mind to be happy.  As I 
look at the most productive and happiest of my clients, they seem to have 
figured this one out. 


Paul