Do not ask someone to be something you are unwilling to be yourself. Leadership is living your vision so completely that others cannot help but do the same.
There are easily hundreds of things I could say about the experience my family had last night. I am only going to focus on one. Consistently in my career I have seen this one quality demonstrated by a small number of leaders to great effect but never more powerfully or totally than in the language, body and presence of Ben Zander.
Mr. Zander is the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic and the co-author of “the book authored by Roz Zander” (his words), The Art of Possibility. I read this book ten years ago. I have taught its principles, attempted to live its precepts, recommended it to countless individuals and groups, and referenced it in some way in every talk I have given and every class I have taught. Further to that I have watched video of Ben Zander speaking, both on Ted
and elsewhere and have become deeply familiar with his style, his stories, his patter and his expressions. Until last night I had never seen him in person and it was exhilarating.
Without overstating it it’s important to say that quite literally there was nothing he said that was new to me. I’ve been paying attention to his work for ten years and the trunk of his tree, along with all of the primary branches are almost precisely the same as when I first read and heard him. He is a living monument to the extraordinary power of redundancy done right.
And the only way to do redundancy that way and that well is by bringing an energy to it that is born of a vision so clear that he cannot help but to shout, sing, cajole, laugh, conduct, clap, dance, contort and otherwise give over his entire physical and emotional presence to the manifestation of it. That vision, simply put, is this: that we will all live from the place of possibility.
My kids were stunned by him. “What is this thing we are going to?” “Why are we doing this on a Tuesday night?” “I have homework. A LOT of homework?”
My fifteen year old: “that wasn’t so bad.” (HUGE praise!)
My nine-year old: “that was awesome.”
And while they were certainly talking in some way about his content they are really talking about the infectiousness, the piercing arrow of his energy.
For a seventy-six year old man to take an audience of that demographic range from laughter to reflection to tears, turning us into a serenading birthday choir in the early going and into a master chorale singing “Ode to Joy” in shattered phonetic German at the top of our lungs later on – all from the compelling force of his vision – is a model so profound that one is left with only one option: to do the very thing he asked of us.
To imagine what else is possible.
