Lucid & Reasoned

Leadership. Over the last decade we’ve entered a period of business (and life, for that matter) characterized by one dominant quality: chaos. We started the decade talking about speed. The conversation then centered around change and change management. For me, the next frontier and evolution of the management of business in a time of chaos is a turning of our collective attention to something that could actually help us orient ourselves and make solid progress: leadership.

For the first time in a long time, the quality and character of our leaders in business is being recognized as the critical success factor that it is. Emerging from the scandals of the last decade (beginning symbolically with Enron and culminating recently with Goldman-Sachs) we’ve stopped marveling at the corruption that can and often does plague the top brass and started recognizing the actual qualities that distinguish a good leader from a bad one.

Marketers love to talk about the tremendous success and unflappable confidence of one particular brand these days–Apple. The brand comes up so often at meetings and in brainstorms that it sometimes has to be taken off the table entirely lest the whole session devolve into an Apple-adoration fest. Steve Jobs is often given credit for the company’s meteoric rise and is seen by the media and fans as something of a demi-god. Books have been written about the man and his mind, his story and style of management, but a blog post I ran across this morning did a very efficient job of calling out something that is not often cited as a Jobs–and by extension, Apple–strength: lucid and reasoned thought…which presumably (and we have the $ evidence to support this) translates into lucid and reasoned action.

Watch these clips contrasting interviews with Steve Jobs and Microsoft’s Ballmer for a great example of how a great leader reasons. Jobs consistently demonstrates a quality more leaders of the next generation are going to have to cultivate in order to cope with the chaos of our operating environment: presence.