ThinkingTom

I’m working on a principal’s certification at AntiochNE University and in a leadership course I had the opportunity to dig through some of the business books that have helped me develop my own leadership identity. Maybe some of these will pique your interest.

1. In the Age of Paradox by Charles Handy, the author asks the question we all ask from time to time: “What is the point of it all”.  He’s referencing our very existence, not just our role as leaders. But in the coming confusing world of the next several decades, he recommends you’ll be better prepared to move ahead by helping your followers create a sense of continuity, a sense of connection and a sense of direction. These attributes provide stability in times when rapid change leaves us feeling powerless or worse.
2. Ricardo Semler has built a multinational corporation from a small Brazilian manufacturing concern by breaking most if not all of the rules and relentlessly asking “Why”. In The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works, Semler offers much advice not easily found in leadership tomes. Of particular interest to educational leaders should be the idea that it is desirable, no – mandatory to establish trust in adult behavior. Too many of our educational bureaucracies suck the lives out of the membership through never-ending policy and procedure campaigns. Semler would ask leaders to pay more attention to what employees do for our learning communities, nothing more. Semler’s aphorism: “By encouraging uniformity, I lose productivity.”
3. Roger Lewin and Birute Regine offer dozens of excellent leadership lessons in the Soul at Work: Embracing Complexity Science for Business Success. Hatim Tyabji is profiled as a leader serving as the moral compass of the organization. Remember to “Do as I do, not do as I say.” Maintaining a personal ethical commitment strengthens your resolve in the face of adversity. Tyabji differentiates between “networking” and “relationships”. Networking too often is undertaken for self-serving reasons, while building a relationship pays dividends to all participants.
4. While Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life would seem a text a leader would proffer to  “staff”, I find this a potent book about taking the inner journey one needs to become genuine and authentic. Palmer characterizes the dilemma as “a journey beyond fear and into authentic selfhood, a journey toward respecting otherness and understanding how connected and resourceful we all are.”
5. Now about the word staff: lose it – think members. Lots of forward thinking leadership experts including Semler and Handy above recognize the importance of shifting the leadership language from the autocratic, chain-of-command vocabulary to a more inviting and holistic set of language. To develop a whole new take read Handy’s The Hungry Spirit, Beyond Capitalism: A Quest for Purpose in the Modern World.
6. Too often the same schools remain in a cycle of failure due to the revolving door to the principal’s office. These are akin to minor league sports franchises where the new principal puts in a year or two to build a resume and then heads off to better districts. Jeffrey Nielsen’s The Myth of Leadership: Creating Leaderless Organizations offers administrators, school boards and committees much to ponder. His hypothesis is based upon shifting from considering rank-based assumptions about leadership to ones derived from peer-based assumptions. Use this book to move your thinking about leadership from a principal model to a shared and open one that engages the teachers who have been members of the community and have made a significant investment.
7. Towards the end of Max DePree’s Leadership is an Art, there is a chapter title intended to get the attention of any leadership book skimmer. That’s a problem in and of itself. People will continue to write and rewrite the same information in a quest to sell their product, so it is difficult to find books or articles that shift your thinking one way or the other. “Pink Ice in the Urinal” will make you turn to the end of this slim volume and DePree identifies a critical issue for leaders that he describes as “the interception of entropy.” Leaders need to watch for signs of deterioration in  systems and public education, awash in bureaucracy, relishes the apathy that allows the same-old, same-old to occur year after year. As a result, many leaders (and followers) don’t see the structure in demise.
8. I used to teach a graduate course in business school, Consulting Skills for Managers. I’ve had the good fortune to work both as an internal and external consultant, and there are many skills that transfer well to the leadership role. Peter Block is the consultant’s consultant and his book Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Experience Used is valuable for any principal. In most district organizations, we find the same autocratic models hamstringing change right to the top. By developing consulting skills, you’ll find a way to get your message heard. Block talks about sharing the platform. He advises, “People do tell truth about organizations; it is just that they do it in private.” To surface truth, Block reminds us to practice “openness and reciprocity…each time we assemble.” Too often the search for truth is mishandled through a “team-building” or a “large-group intervention” asserts Block. I’m sure many of us agree, having been participants in some training fiasco!
9. Meg Wheatley’s work is always a fertile place for leaders and individuals alike. Along with Senge’s The Fifth Discipline, Wheatley’s breakthrough bestseller Leadership and the New Science: Learning About Organization from an Orderly Universe provided me with a way to see differently. Speaking of relationships and the need to understand, cultivate and create them, the author shows how that in the natural world “order is maintained in the midst of change because autonomy exists at the local levels.” This often contradicts the contemporary approach to organizing public education systems.
10. Yvon Chouinard’s let my people go surfing: the education of a reluctant businessman has provided me with the understanding that to be the very best leader I can be, I am the same person who must be open and receptive to ideas from all over. Chouinard states “success and longevity lie in our ability to change quickly. Continuous change and innovation require maintaining a sense of urgency.” As we continue to learn more about learning, and as we architect a new world beyond fossil fuel, we’re charged with educating children for membership in a world yet unknown. Our current educational model, the industrial one, has been carefully honed for more than a century. Our new models may as well be written in disappearing ink, as our needs to adapt will only multiply for the foreseeable future.

Perhaps you have some leadership lessons from texts you’d care to share?

Michael Thomas – Man Gone Down

A few days before leaving for Rome at the end of June, I saw the news that Michael Thomas had been awarded the Impac Dublin Prize in a terrific New York Times article by a fine journalist, Larry Rother. I headed straightaway to The Toadstool in Peterborough and packed a copy. On the plane from Boston to Rome and in our cool and welcoming room at  the Albergo del Senato after daylong touring and eating, I devoured his book in our four days in Rome. The novel itself covers a period of four frenetic days in the life of an extremely burdened man, a man living in  spheres of blackness and whiteness, sobriety and dependence, wealth and poverty, white collar and blue collar… the list is a litany of modern man in so many ways.

The work itself flows energetically and engaged me in a most visceral way. Thomas writes intimately one moment and then paints broad brushstrokes of details that allow the reader breathing space needed to digest, process and survive the dialogue. And like other works dealing with taboo topics, Thomas makes masterful use of humor as a means to keep us working on the novel. One view of this book is through an African-American lens, but a more catholic readership will find much to consider in Man Gone Down.

This book belongs on high school reading lists for a number of reasons, but I am skeptical that we will see it widely taught. But if we are trying to connect our secondary school readers to the importance of the novel, this contemporary offering provides a world that they inhabit and have considerable background knowledge about. And as many reviewers have observed, Thomas is a literary writer and his work offers connections into works by many authors resident in the canon of American literature: think Ellison, Twain, Diaz, Cather and Alvarez to name just a few!

How Birds Sing

One is not taxed;
one need not practice;
one simply tips
the throat back
over the spine axis
and asserts the chest.
The wings and the rest
compress a musical
squeeze which floats
a series of notes
upon the breeze.

–Kay Ryan

Ah, celebrate the poet.

Sharing, Conversation and Collaboration must be integral in our instructional design – and collective action is a means by which the progressive educators can ignite/incite a evolutionary leap in K-20 education.