Clarity, Courage and Strategy

In that moment of realization I saw that all great leaders – whether Gandhi, Jesus or Krishna or anyone else – had this quality in abundance. They had their own inner light which burned bright and showed them the way in their moments of darkness, fear, confusion and dilemma.

Last Sunday I was invited to speak on “strategy” to an unlikely audience at an unusual venue on a beautiful morning.

The audience consisted of about 30 Christian adults who seemed eager to learn to become leaders in their own spheres. They had assembled under a banner called “Power to lead” started by my friends Dr Raja Smarta and Ruth DeSouza. The venue was the green and sprawling campus of St Pius seminary at Goregaon.

Everything conspired that morning to enable me to make connections of strategy to things that I had heard and read several years ago in the 80s and 90s. My mind recollected Carlos Casteneda’s book “Tales of Power” from the 90s where he describes the qualities of a “warrior”. Further back I went back to Werner Erhard’s “est” course I had once attended and its description of being either “at effect” or “at source”. And then I went back to my childhood when my grandmother told me the story of Mahabharata where Arjuna was faced with the dilemma of warring against his own relatives when Arjuna was reminded of his duty (”Dharma”) in his principle role in life as the warrior king. In that beautiful morning I made the connection and learnt that the words like “strategy”, “warrior king”, “at-effect”, “character” all mean the same thing.

In that moment of realization I saw that all great leaders – whether Gandhi, Jesus or Krishna or anyone else – had this quality in abundance. They had their own inner light which burned bright and showed them the way in their moments of darkness, fear, confusion and dilemma. Most of us mortals are stressed out due to the dilemmas we face and the compromises we make in our daily lives. Hence we admire those who have sorted themselves out what they are here for - and unhesitatingly know what purposes they will pursue - and also know what they will not. This is the stuff which leaders are made of. The connection between leadership and strategy is so strong that people will many times follow a leader even if his strategy is wrong - Hitler is an example – as long as they see clarity and courage in the leader.

If I look back, the my main message that morning was the same for individuals, groups and companies. Do not waste time in solving the dilemmas every day between so many activities making demands on your scarce resources. Instead of focusing on the lower orbit of deciding “which activities”, go to the higher orbit of deciding “which purposes”. You will save a lot of time and feel more at ease when, instead of considering the “trivial many” decisions regarding activities, you will focus and decide on what are those “vital few” purposes. Once sorted out, these vital few decisions will guide you into objectives, sub-objectives and activities that come out from the strategy. After all, what is a strategy? It is the choice of purposes (not activities) you have made to guide your activities.

3 things are really needed for you as a leader to travel on the right path. First, you need a calm mind to clearly see what purposes (strategic objectives) are important to you and your group. Second, you need to have a strong intent to act on your decisions : to have the conviction, commitment and courage. Thirdly, you need to operationalize and implement the strategy through (a) Planning : what will be done, towards what targets and outcomes, who will do it, by when, how and within what time and money constraints (b) Implementation : to contact the stakeholders and understand their expectations before finalizing the strategy, to communicate the plan and targets and milestones, to monitor the progress and take corrective action (c) to create structure for implementation regarding who will do what : secretary, treasurer, storekeeper, accountant etc.

There are many examples – small and big – to illustrate the benefit of thinking in terms of purpose rather than activities. Let me give only one. In the American space program, they realized that a ball pen cannot be used in the space because of the absence of gravity which pressures ink forward and went in search of "a ball pen that can write under no gravity situation” and it took them millions to develop a pen. The Russians used a pencil because they defined their purpose as writing on paper.

When you choose to undertake an activity – for the sake of the activity without knowing the purpose behind it – you are at best wasting your time and at worst harming yourself. Do you feel compelled to answer someone just because something has put something in your inbox even when it is not your priority? Do you eat just because it happens to be a lunch time even when you are not hungry? Do you feel compelled to react back when someone has hurt you even when doing so is against your long term interest? In each of these cases you are acting as if you are not a leader and as if you have no strategy.