Eagle Talk

One of the keys for success as a motivator and leader in today’s rapidly changing and intensely challenging global business environment is your ability to examine the core issues that are at the heart of the problem you are seeking to solve.  I call this ‘Cerebral Heroism.’  If you can learn to do this, you make it possible for others to engage in the freedom of thought and action that empowers men and women to be themselves and play their best game.

The last few months has been a roller-coaster for each of us, regardless of our business, our role or position. Listening to news broadcasts on TV, reading blogs on the internet, or following Bloomberg’s global financial overviews, we are surrounded by problems that possess the potential for disrupting growth and society around the world.  All of us have an obligation to insist our leadership find a viable way forward. 

Never has leadership, in its fullest sense and meaning of the word, been more important.  Whether it is political, business, or educational leadership, our failure to successfully exercise it can become another example of what Winston Churchill called, “Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong – these are features which constitute the endless repetition of history.”

It remains to be seen if our global environment shall fall victim to what Edwin H. Friedman identified so well and clearly in his book, A Failure of Nerve, Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix.  

Now is the time for each of us to step forward, have the emotional courage to speak up and speak out, and demand that those who are in leadership positions be leaders in all they say and do.