Phil's blog

“A Harvard Business School study looked at job satisfaction. Orchestra players came just below prison guards. Chamber musicians came in at number 1. What’s the difference? The presence of a conductor.”
Boston Philharmonic Conductor Ben Zander, speaking at Leaders in London 2007

Rosamund Zander, Benjamin’s wife, wrote: “There is no guiding institution that speaks compellingly to people. Markets have replaced institutions and markets do not speak in a human tongue. This radical shift cries out for creativity. Art is about rearranging us.”

The leader, according to Zander, is the one who is masterful at creating and holding distinctions. Learning and leading is not about the transference of information, from conductor to orchestra or leader to employee. It is about the opening up of new categories to help people make sense of and thrive in a fast-changing world in which existing categories are not creative enough. “Framemakers create new frames. There is no problem that can’t be solved if you are willing to make a new frame, a new category.”

More from Zander at the Leaders in London blog, which I write weekly.

Heard a great leadership lesson from the unlikely world of ballet today. Wayne Sleep, the former Royal Ballet dancer, described how Ninette de Valois, founder and then director of The Royal Ballet, brought together Dame Margot Fonteyn, then 41 and on the verge of retiring, with the virtually unknown 21-year-old Rudolf Nureyev, to dance Romeo and Juliet in 1963.

There was nervousness and apprehension on all sides: from the two principals themselves and from the ballet world in general. De Valois could have been setting everyone’s reputation up for a spectacular fall, including her own.

But, her instincts told her that this pairing could create something great, accelerate Nureyev’s development by pairing him with the greatest dancer of her generation, and revive Fonteyn’s career. In effect, it lifted the latter to even new heights, and she continued dancing, astonishingly, until she was 61.

By breaking convention and seeing the possibility that others couldn’t see, de Valois created possibly the greatest pairing in modern ballet. They went on to dance twenty roles together in the next decades.

I am personally completely unmoved by ballet; it leaves me cold. But, there are so many leadership lessons in that story that I lost count. The three that stuck, for me, are:

1. Tom Peters is fond of quoting Warren Bennis – “Great leaders revel in the talent of others”. Absolutely. Bringing other people together and watching them reach heights no-one had dreamt of is an act of leadership.

2. Great leaders are prepared to look foolish, as Sir John Hoskyns said. Any of us who step up, in any situation, and say or do what needs to be said or done, regardless of ridicule, regardless of established convention, is performing a powerfully creative act of leadership.

3. The myth of individual creativity and of the individual as leader: It can take two, or more, to unleash incredible creativity. The same with leadership – from Hewlett and Packard to Pret a Manger founders Sinclair Beecham and Julian Metcalfe, it often takes two or more to lead creatively and some of the best leadership acts and the most creative cultures are formed by a partnership…or even by a mass of people all leading and following each other simultaneously (flash mobs, for example).

Wayne Sleep was talking on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.

I’m a bit late on this, and thanks to Leadership Hub member Annalie Killian for drawing it to my attention:

“A study claims that between the ages of 20 and 40 people lose about one friend every year. Writer Theodore Zeldin, who has spent a lifetime studying friendships, wants to celebrate his 74th birthday with everyone – but only if you promise to have a proper conversation with a stranger.”

Zeldin wants us all to have deeper and richer conversations:

“…the Zeldin Method is a rather exacting solution.

His menu of conversation usually takes around two hours to complete and took up to four when the strangers were French.

However, he claims 99% of the participants found it enlightening and enjoyable, and a reflection that while we may be talking all the time we avoid discussing things in any depth.

He is also not a fan of small talk and gossip. It is, he says, like apes grooming one another.

It helps bond us but it fails to help us understand one another.”

More of the above article here: The Birthday of Strangers
And more on Zeldin’s ‘Muse Conversations’ approach to deepening our communication here: Muse Conversations