Leadercast 2015 Notes

This year's Leadercast was excellent. Here's my highlights.

Andy Stanley

Bold Leadership Myths

• Bold leadership is reserved for bold people. 
• Bold leadership is reserved for fearless people. All the fearless people are dead.
• Bold leadership requires a specific gift or talent.
• Bold leadership is for the ultra-smart or ultra-intelligent.

Best pictures of bold leadership: A middle school girl in pursuit of an iPhone!

Characteristics of Bold Leadership

• Clarity
• Focus
• Stubbornness
• Resourceful

Definition: Bold leadership is clarity around and an unreasonable commitment to what should be.

Examples: Mom who corrected her son in Baltimore. Man who invented Mathnasium. Howard Schultz and Starbucks.

All of us have the potential, when we trip over that thing, idea or product that needs to change, for bold leadership once we discover what that thing is!

Bold leaders refuse to be cowed by how.

You can how a great idea to death! Instead say, “wow!” not “how?” The how question is a bad habit. We first go to, “How much will it cost?” or “How will we do it?"

Two Breadcrumb Questions to Discover Your Wow Idea

1. What do I believe is impossible to do in my field…but if it could be done, would fundamentally change my business?” — Joes Barker, Paradigms
   Even if you are not the person or company that has the breakthrough idea, when you hear about somebody else coming up with an answer to this questions, you need to be the first in line to embrace the breakthrough idea even if it is not your idea.
   
2. What breaks my heart? What would I like people to line up and thank me for when I am an old lady/man?
   
   World Vision. Habitat for Humanity. TOMS.
   
   Nehemiah — “I am doing a great work and I cannot come down.”
   Do not let your calendar or your organization conspire against you if you have focused on that one idea. Do not let go of that one thing. 

Rorke Denver

Bravery

The counterpoint to bravery is fear. The response to fear is always to face it. You must inoculate yourself.

• Limit your field of view and you will see more.
  
  Sniper lingo — deconstruct the hillside and break it into manageable chunks. Otherwise you will see nothing.
  
• Make bold corrections. Little shifts equal little results. Bold corrections equal bold results.
  
• Bravery doesn’t have to be a solo experience. It is a team sport.
  
• Choose the size/type of your bag wisely. What are you taking home? What are you carrying with you?
  
• Find your harmonic gate. Find the rhythm that God intended for you.
  
• Lean into the pain. Do not avoid it. Recognize that pain is a growth opportunity.

Malala Yousafzai

World’s Youngest Nobel Peace Prize Winner 

Peyton Manning

Anyone who waits for someone else to make the change becomes a follower. Everyone has faced major decisions with much riding on the outcome. The bigger the decisions, the fiercer the conversation with yourself needs to be. It requires as much courage as it does confidence to look yourself in the mirror and actually act on the facts that come out of that fierce conversation.

Game Changers

1. Learn to thrive on being uncomfortable! This means being prepared, but it also means pushing yourself into awkward and difficult situations.
2. Devote yourself to intense preparation. 
3. Invest in a coach. It doesn’t matter how seasoned any of us are, everyone can benefit from a coach. We all need someone who has the capacity to point out what works, but more importantly what doesn’t work. 
4. Find a way to instill trust in others. 
5. Think about drawing a new baseline for yourself and for your organization. Figure out what you can and cannot do and adjust. Life changes, you get older, the organization changes — you have to figure out how to keep moving forward and keep being successful. Don’t just rely on what worked yesterday. You have to figure out what works today!
6. Become a master observer. You must be willing to stop and look. The simple process of focusing on the issues and putting the pieces together. 
7. Set goals that contribute to the team’s overall performance, not just your own.

Seth Godin

If we care enough, we should be brave enough!

Everyone holds a little bit back. Everyone tends to copy everyone else.

The only way to truly make art, to truly be unique, to truly make a change happen, we must be ALL IN.

We can be prepared, but we will never be ready, because our work is always “too soon."

Change has a twin sister named tension. We have all been trained to avoid tension!

5 Concepts of the Bravery of Our Future

1. Tension. Ella Fitzgerald put on an integrated show of music just to create tension.
2. Obsession. 
3. Connection.

Ed Catmull

Don’t focus on the ideas. Focus on the dynamic of the team. A bad team will destroy any goo idea. A good team will take a poor idea and make it better or throw it out.

Rudy Guliani

1. You have to have strong beliefs. You have to know what you believe in. The people who succeed have strong beliefs.
2. To be a leader you have to be an optimist. Make yourself a problem solver. Don’t get beaten down by problems so much that you can’t get out of the problem. Every problem has an ability to make it less severe if not a solution.
3. You have to put fear in its place. Let it be a motivator to work harder and do a better job.
4. You must prepare relentlessly. Prepare, prepare, prepare.
5. Never believe it is about you, it is about the team. The team gets the job done. 
6. You must communicate. You have to be able to get your ideas out to people.