Monday Morning Mojo

Our Precious Resource

Visionary leadership is transformative. It involves greatness, penetrating the ordinary to arrive at a new land, reaching through time to bring out the best the world has to offer. Such a leader anticipates events, influences the future, and enables people to flourish.

This means perceiving challenges and growth opportunities before they happen while positioning to produce extraordinary results that make a real contribution.

This kind of leadership requires total involvement, tremendous work, a willingness to put everything on the line and continuous engagement. Visionaries often suffer opposition from all sides. Yet, the payoff includes the personal reward that comes from making a genuine and substantive contribution to humanity.

For example, in the fall of 1997 I first heard about the Comprehensive Development Framework from Jim Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank. His inspirational idea pulled together concepts from many disciplines and laid out a framework for the effective alleviation of global poverty - no small task.

He called for a holistic approach that put social concerns on equal footing with economic issues and, most importantly, put each country in charge of its own success.

Though many heralded these new ideas, they initially received criticism from all corners: denounced as a turn away from the necessary, hard line economic approach. Yet, today this framework has been embraced on a global scale and is often the reference for the creation of new policies addressing poverty.

Leaders not only have a clear idea of what is possible, they are involved in bringing it about. Mahatma Ghandi did more than recognize the value of religious tolerance and sovereignty ghandi

for the people of India, he used his life to make it possible. Ghandi drew on everything to instigate the changes he was seeking: his diet, his clothing, his community, and his speech. When a reporter asked him to state his message for the world, Ghandi replied, "My life is my message."

Martin Luther King, Jr, did more than have a dream of racial equality in the United States, he advanced civil rights through a critical juncture in American history. People who foresee great potential can exert their influence and bring about profound changes in the ways people live and work together for the benefit of all humanity.

Qualities that enable this kind of broad impact include imagination, engagement, tangible results, and penetrating self-reflection.

A strong imagination is needed to envision the future with clarity. This makes it possible for all who share the dreaming to know the courses of action to be taken.

mlk

Visionaries do not shirk from the overwhelming complexity of the world; instead they engage society with its competing, divergent viewpoints.

In order to marshal the best possible chance of success they seek to communicate effectively: sharing and listening, building their knowledge through collaboration.

Through their personal yearning to make a lasting, social contribution, they put in the time, energy and attention necessary to generate tangible results. They give everything to bring out their best, often plunging their personal depths to build from within. It is from this precious resource, the inner world, which greatness emerges.

VisionaryLeadership.com