FOREWORD
Most people are so used to hearing about the complete leader, the whole leader, and the balanced leader that it probably brings you up short to think of the unfinished leader as a role model. But that is what this book is all about.
When could an unfinished leader be good? Well, it might be in a complex world in which there are no easy answers. In a world where leaders need to see themselves as constantly open to new possibilities. In a world where leaders are willing to jump on new ideas and accept that they probably don't have all the answers—and never will.
A leadership model that posits that the ideal leader is finished—complete and self-sufficient—has several inadequacies in today's world. First, leadership is becoming a collective experience as the world becomes more complex. Few leaders today can manage the challenges of a complex, technology-driven, connected marketplace by themselves. The increasing numbers of books on collaboration underscore the need for leaders to achieve their organizations' objectives in a way that moves them beyond whether they personally are finished leaders.
This coincides with a trend in leadership research to identify effective leaders as authentic in their relations both with others and with themselves. That means acknowledging strengths and weaknesses and ensuring that the best skills are applied to manage the most important challenges. This again requires moving beyond thinking about one individual as an independent, finished actor.
The leadership literature today also stresses the concept of effective leaders as self-aware. And being self-aware in today's world also means being aware that you can't consider yourself finished as a leader. We are all destined to be unfinished as we continue to learn and develop for ever-changing challenges.
But we need unfinished leaders for yet other reasons. As the authors point out, we will never finish the most important personal and professional challenges. This is because more and more of our problems are not puzzles to be solved but paradoxes to be managed on a continuing basis that has no end. This turns the image of an effective leader as decisive problem solver on end. Effectiveness in a global, interconnected world depends on leaders who accept not only that they will never be finished but that the world around them will never be finished. Many of the most important challenges we face will never be solved once and for all.
This does not mean there cannot be temporary solutions, only that fewer solutions will last. The Chinese for centuries have believed the world is on a continuum between yin and yang. The pendulum stops for a split second only before it starts swinging in the opposite direction. I was interviewing a leader in Shanghai a few years ago, and he said with pride that his business had been very successful in recent years. As a result, he was working hard to anticipate a future downturn, because he knew life was never one-sided. The swing of the pendulum would require him to “manage the other side.”
Many leaders operate as if they fail to see the other side. They believe they have found the solution—the best product, the best market, or even the best niche to ride “just for the next year.” But anticipating the other side of success is a basic skill of an unfinished leader, who understands that no victory comes without the shadow of the next wave of innovation.
One could posit that all effective leaders are unfinished—in their work and in their own development. That is the contention of the authors of this unusual and important work.
The authors point out that paradoxes, unlike puzzles, have more than one right answer, and more important, they do not have an ending. Paradoxes are not susceptible to being finished. The only way we can successfully manage paradoxes is to understand that we as leaders will never be finished. Never finished in our solution to all problems. Never finished in our achievement of all goals. Never finished in the development of ourselves.
In our businesses and nations, we are daily becoming more globally entwined. This is leading to new innovations, increased productivity, growing GDPs, and a better quality of life for a majority of the people in the world. It is also opening us to the threat of pandemic diseases, terrorism, and outsourced jobs that will never return.
This sounds a like a bleak picture. And it raises many complex problems. Complex, yes, but not necessarily bleak.
Leaders who strive for final solutions will never be successful. The essence of future leadership will be the ability to manage a world of contradictory demands and needs. It will demand weighing each and ensuring that over the long term all critical needs are addressed. This is not to say that there are not challenges to be overcome, goals to be met, and victories to be claimed. But the world is filled with those conundrums we call paradoxes—the issues that demand that we choose between right and right, where one solution is never final, only temporary. No paradox can be finished once and for all. Only leaders willing to accept that the world is not simple and cannot be tidy will be effective.
There is an old saying: “For every complex problem, there is a simple answer—and it is wrong.” Working with that belief, the authors posit that successful leadership in the future will depend on mindset—a way of looking at the world that allows one to weigh opposing and contradictory demands and manage them on an ongoing basis. This in turn depends on how we live and lead others to “jump over the line” from puzzles to paradoxes, and from certainty to openness. The best leaders are those who can see the bigger, broader picture on a global basis and not be overwhelmed by the world's variety of values, viewpoints, and needs.
Developing an open mindset is more important now than ever. We can see how closed mindsets are creating turmoil throughout the world. Fundamentalists of all stripes—political, economic, religious, social—are claiming they have the answer to one side of a paradox. Remember, for every complex problem there is an easy answer—and what most fundamentalists have to offer are simple, easy answers that represent only one side of the right-versus-right conundrum posed by the world's paradoxes.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once noted, “The test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in one's head at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Too few people today are passing that test. Instead, they retreat into ideologies or interest groups that have no interest in reconciling differences because they do not acknowledge the rightness of the other perspective.
Each of us has a personal as well as professional journey to cut through a diverse, ambiguous, and uncertain world. In the process, our ability to reconcile differences and develop new mindsets for paradoxical thinking will be critical—critical not only to our own happiness and development but to the capacity of the world to deal with its uncertain and unsettled future.