shinsato.com

Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles wrote a page turner with their book Gung Ho! A book about leadership, the lesson was delivered in the form of a story where a manager is tasked with turning around a failing plant and instead her own ideas of leadership are turned around by a maverick manager of one of the teams at this plant.

It’s a great book. I hope many people read it and take it to heart. It lays a very realistic plan for optimum performance through the honoring of the individual as more than a resource, as people with real lives, concerns, hopes, and dreams. And that when we embrace the full humanity only then will the team come together to provide high performance for the company’s objectives.

There are so many business books on leadership, yet there seems to be such a lack of it most of the time. Perhaps leadership has much more to do with every one of us than it does the people at the “top”.

The World War II term, Gung Ho!, actually came from the Chinese word Gōnghé which is short for a longer phrase meaning “industrial workers cooperative”. It’s interesting that an über-capitalist book would adopt a Chinese Communist term, but perhaps it is indeed only in the collective that we’ll ever get to participate in truly enthusiastic collaborative – and fulfilling – work.

Thank you to Phil Gerbyshak for pointing out this talk by Ben Zander at TED. I don’t know if I can introduce it better than Phil, as Phil saw the full 75 minute lecture live. Ben Zander shows the difference between playing a piece with short phrasing and playing it with the full vision in mind and rocking from one buttocks to another slowly with long phrasing.  Seeing the full vision is the difference between getting distracted with what we’re going to have for lunch and a Nelson Mandela who spends 25 years in prison. Please watch this!