UNCONVENTIONAL THINKING BLOG

You can’t see it coming. There is no omen. No drum roll. No sense of impending romance or intrigue.

And then suddenly, everything changes. It comes out of the night like Haley’s comet, electric tail illuminating the sky, and you know you have seen something, experienced something so powerful, that you will never be the same.

You stand there, motionless, watching a fire on a lake.

It is a life changer. Spiritual and emotional, it radiates through your heart and your brain and prompts you to reconsider “what is” and to imagine, in spite of the obstacles and the challenges, “what could be.”

Only people can do this to and for you. Only you can do it to others. One of the sublime things about life, about business, is that you can experience this working side by side with others who open your eyes to new dimensions. I am often asked what makes great managers. Is it an MBA from Harvard? Ten years of cross-functional experience at GE? Absolutely not. It is being alone in a studio watching Picasso turn blank canvases into cubes of radiance. It is observing Martha Stewart as she turned the art of entertaining into an empire. It is the person in the office next door who shows you how to identify atomic particles, twist them into novel configurations and shape them into living, breathing figments of your imagination.

Working hard is not even close to enough. You need to experience the comets. To learn from them. To let yourself be captured, to absorb, to dream, to love, to experiment, to dare. This is what makes great leaders great.

They see the fire on the lake and they change.

Mark Stevens
CEO

What Are You Waiting For To Change?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 12:18 pm and is filed under Business, Management, Small Business, Unconventional Thinking . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.