Sun 8 Jul 2007
Okay, I’m going to act like a real blogger for a moment. Here are two things on the internet that I think are just fascinating:
http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/04/my_other_interv_1.html
The first is a WIRED magazine interview with Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, from 2005. He’s got really perceptive things to say about the impact of a leader’s thoughts, actions, and decisions on all the other people involved, and the importance of involving relevant people in the decision-making process; the compromises you have to make (in terms of violating a *pure* consensus model) to actually get things done and decisions made; and the way to channel other people’s brilliance in the most productive way possible. He speaks humbly and gives full credit to his collaborators, but I have a glimmer of an idea that very few people in the world are capable of leading a company like Google as successfully as he does. The bulk of this interview is stuff that I can apply to leading a theatre company. (For those not immersed in a high-tech culture: the “20 percent time” that they talk about during part of the interview is the Google corporate policy of encouraging each employee to devote 20 percent of their work time to a project of their own devising, that they work on at their own pace and share with their fellows. After I first read this interview, I had a dream that night that I was running a theatre company in which all the collaborators were expected to be working on their own side projects as well. I need to think more about how to apply all the other stuff he talks about.)
The second link is a ‘modern speech’ translation of Washington’s Farewell Address (courtesy Randall Munroe of xkcd.com fame.) I include this link instead of Washington’s original address because Randall did a pretty good job of the ‘translation’, and it’s much easier to get through (though if you’re a purist you can follow the link on Randall’s blog to Washington’s original text.) It’s another example of really impressive leadership, and it’s sad that in my lifetime I don’t think I’ve seen a president who could address the problems of running the country as a whole in such a thoughtful, honest, non-condescending way. I’m a little spooked by his assertion that only religious people can be truly moral, but aside from that, this speech evinces overtones of the same things I see in Schmidt’s interview: a willingness to learn from experience, an acknowledgment that not everything is figured out yet, a deep understanding of how people work together, a deep distrust of segmentation, and a certain amount of humility about his own role in it all.
Both these articles have been haunting me for months now. Anyone with thoughts about them, call me! Let’s talk pretentiously about leadership as if we know something about it, whee!
:-p It’s 2:40 in the morning. I can never tell how seriously to take myself at this hour. G’night, beautiful people.
Alissa