My writings - and those of others.
A remarkable performance
I’ve heard some wonderful musicians in my time but a recent performance was remarkable. In the complex where I used to live we started a small concert series for the neighborhood and it has lasted several years with a variety of performers. This one was special because we were introduced to something totally new to us.
When a five year old starts to play the accordion look out. Michael Bridge has not only mastered the traditional one but introduced us to the digital one. The following performance is done entirely on this single instrument. It appears on his most recent recording.
Leading
The orchestral conductor, Benjamin Zander, is a frequent business speaker and famous for his TED talk. now viewed by more than eight million people. Conductors are sometimes viewed as the last of the great dictators. Zander is different. He had an epiphany some years ago when he realized that the conductor of an orchestra plays a different role.
The insight transformed his conducting and his orchestral musicians immediately noticed the difference. Now he’s a leader who asks for input in the form of written comments at every rehearsal. He understands that the musicians’ skills and experience enhance his own.
His gifts as a teacher are remarkable too and they are now shared through masterclasses for all of us on YouTube. The students perform with technical brilliance before he enters in with a consistent message – it is time to relax and let go of the kind of competitive excellence their preparatory training has provided and instead relate to their audience. Transformation happens before our own shining eyes. You can watch several of his master classes on YouTube and see him actively engaged in making the music come alive - even resorting to hair pulling - not a conventional teaching technique – but see how effectively it works in creating a totally different kind of performer).
Zander’s passion is for introducing classical music to those unfamiliar with it and he does so with incredible skill and experience in making audiences and performers connect. It’s a worthwhile example of how a leader inspires and transforms performance.
Originally published on another site in 2017
A Different Take on Leadership
Some time ago I attended a meeting relating to the roll out of a strategic plan. The agenda was to review the requirements for leadership and leadership training. The context was for a mainline church denomination but some of the discussion could apply more broadly.
Several participants had been asked to research and bring leadership concepts and common key words emerged for leadership roles. Words like “mediating”, “perfecting”, offering” and “blessing” appeared in one report. In another the author had been fond of the letter “C” – and used nouns like “character”, “calling”, “competence” and “community”. “Servant” leadership was also on the table.
My own contribution came from a longer paper I wrote some years earlier and I focused first on changes in world view, vision and mission, structural change, personal characteristics and personal development. My key words echoed some of the others – “discipline”, “humility” and “learner”. I was also strong on “collaboration” rather than “hierarchy” even though we are still working within a hierarchical structure. But leader still assumes followers and someone has to take the first step.
The most interesting submission was a summary of a work by Ed Friedman entitled A Failure of Nerve. The writer of the summary had limited himself to 500 words and boiled down the role of the leader to a non-anxious presence. We spent little time on Friedman’s idea in the meeting, but I had read his book some years before and its mention whetted my appetite to return to it.
A Failure of Nerve was compiled after Friedman’s death in 1996 by his daughter and students and has been recently reissued. It is timely. Friedman was a rabbi and psychotherapist by training and as well as founding a successful congregation he served as adviser to six US presidents as well as to many senior church leaders and individual clients. Even before his death he saw that America in the nineties had become a frightened society, fearing change and seeking safety as opposed to the spirit of adventure of its early explorers and founders. He’s strongly critical of this stance and challenges us to change our mental models.
Friedman is often caustic and witty – and several readers have collected maxims that represent the substance of his thinking. Here are some that apply to leadership:
Leadership can be thought of as a capacity to define oneself to others in a way that clarifies and expands a vision of the future.
‘no good deed goes unpunished; chronic criticism is, if anything, often a sign that the leader is functioning better! Vision is not enough.
Leaders need “… to focus first on their own integrity and on the nature of their own presence rather than through techniques for manipulating or motivating others.”
Leadership through self-differentiation is not easy; learning techniques and imbibing data are far easier. Nor is striving or achieving success as a leader without pain: there is the pain of isolation, the pain of loneliness, the pain of personal attacks, the pain of losing friends. That’s what leadership is all about.here
Much of where Friedman is coming from is defining church congregations and enterprise units as family systems, a concept developed fully by therapist Murray Bowen. It posits that we call rational in congregations and enterprises is always framed by the emotional responses learned in our personal birth and extended families. Those families and tribes, like all systems, seek equilibrium. When things get tense, it’s likely that learned behavior in earlier systems are in play. When things are going well, Friedman says, expect sabotage.
The remedy is for the leader to develop self-differentiation rather than to try to persuade or motivate others to change.If a non-anxious presence is required it assumes there is already anxiety and conflict in the room. But it is working on one’s own development that allows others to learn by example – and take responsibility for their own development.
There is much more to learn in Friedman’s approach – and that will be a feature of future posts.
First published on anther site in June 2017
Summer Reading
This isn’t an exhaustive list - l read whodunits and lighthearted novels in the summer in addition to the endless newspapers and magazines - but some time ago I decided that hard cover and paperback books still count. Those pictured above are important and life changing.
With the Harari trio I started in the middle with Homo Deus as a Christmas present from family members who know I like this kind of thing. The second earlier one, Sapiens, was inspired by reading the first - and the last, 21 Lessons, was immediately on my must read list. I note that within days of publication it is already second on Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller List with its release only this September.
Harari can be described as a cultural historian and these three books deal with the the future, the past, and the present. He is insightful, opinionated and always provocative. Critical of both religion and politics for their insularity and selfcenterdness, he repeatedly says we need a new story for a global world. Journey of the Universe just might fill that role and I am curious whether he has read it. The authors are not cited in the index in any of them.
Journey of the Universe is a book, a movie - available via a website with that name - and also a conference at Yale in which the last book in the image is a Christian reflection on the story. It’s focused not solely on the planet but on an even bigger story. Author Brain Swimme is quoted on the back cover of Living Cosmology saying that mulling over the contents could be life changing. I agree. I don’t know whether all faith groups have responded to this - but they should. More on this in coming posts.
Why Festivals Enchant
A recent review of the closing of the Toronto Summer Music Festival is highly positive but questions why the audience is moved to so many standing ovations. In one way I know what he means. Some years ago at the conclusion of a performance of Mahler's Symphony of a Thouand, I found myself propelled to a standing position by the sheer force of it. There was nothing polite about it involving a decision to get up. It just happened.
The critic wishes that the crowd wouldn't jump up so enthusiastically so often, even though he commends the Festival format with its combination of free and paid performances, a tight time frame and a summer timetable.
Perhaps I can help - as a well tempered listener who attended more than 25 of the events. The reviewer does note that there is a core audience like me that attends everything. I'm a relative newcomer, but some have attended in the same way over the last 13 years. They know the returning performers by name and have a strong sense of who they are.
I had the privilege of sitting at the feet of the late Nicholas Goldschmidt in the 80's. At that time Niki was already more than twice the age of current artistic director Jonathan Crowe and he had honed the concept with an understanding that Festivals create excitement and momentum in a way that a single performance never can. Even subscriptions, great as they are, have too much space between events for that.
Niki's Festivals often crossed artistic discipline lines. Jonathan's combine different musical genres and levels of experience in the presenters. One of the strengths of this Festival is that it unites up-and-coming instrumentalists and singers with the finest professionals. The pros mentor the emerging artists by rehearsing and playing with them in public - or in the case of the singers, by conducting public masterclasses. The result is an immersion in all kinds of music and levels of understanding for both for performers and the listeners. Audience members stroll up the shady Philosophers Walk night after night fulfilled and happy.
The critic, perhaps correctly, thought the young instrumentalists in the final concert were too energetic and needed more nuance. Probably that is true. But what he perhaps misses in the standing ovations of the appreciative audience is their dominant demographic. Put aside for the moment the worry that there will be no audience for classical music in the decades to come. What those of us at this stage of our life recognize is the sheer beauty and poignancy of so much of what we are hearing - perhaps for the last time. It's worth standing up and applauding for that.