By Jason Lim
Google ``Tao of Leadership" and you will get a listing of several Western management books and articles that mostly reinterpret Lao Tzu's ``Tao Te Ching" in an archaic, New Age-like language that flutters and dances like a butterfly that ponders the external longing of the cosmos but sighs without taking a breath in the zephyr of spring. Say what? Exactly.
In fact, these leadership tomes supposedly derived from the wisdom of the East merely re-package the trite leadership maxims out there already. No wonder they sound like a New Age executive daily calendar or motivational posters ubiquitous only in SkyMall catalogues.
This is too bad because Eastern spiritual mysticism has much to teach us about the true nature of leadership because it was essentially the management science of ancient Eastern civilization. It sought to provide a definite and reachable goal of intellectual understanding and mental awareness to aid in personal growth and leadership development.
The trouble with applying spiritual mysticism to real-world leadership is that any attempt to explain it in words actually complicates it beyond understanding. This is because spiritual understanding of human nature is not a piece of information that you can memorize. It's more of a state of deep understanding and conscious awareness that will drive your everyday behavior.
However, the actual ``Tao of Leadership" can be made less foreboding by focusing on its components that relate directly to self-development. It essentially boils down to two fundamental insights of the nature of existence.
The first component is the insight of transience, or impermanence. In other words, it means that everything that has a form is bound to decay, die, and disappear eventually. Nothing remains forever.
This means you. You, no matter how rich or powerful you are, will get old, sick, and die. Any company, no matter how much it may be fiscally sound, will eventually become a vestige of history. A legendary CEO, no matter how celebrated, will be soon forgotten. This is an inescapable fact.
The second component, which follows upon the first, is the insight of selflessness. This is trickier to comprehend. Selflessness does not mean unselfishness, because selflessness does not refer to human intention or emotion. Instead, selflessness is a state of being. It is the state in which you exist at this very moment.
Selflessness is best articulated through an observation made by Fred Kofman and Peter Senge (1993):
``We are startled to discover that at the core of the person, at the center of selfhood, there is nothing, pure energy. When we reach into the most fundamental basis of our being we find a pregnant void, a web of relationships. When somebody asks us to talk about ourselves, we talk about family, work, academic background, sports affiliations, etc. In all this talk, where is our 'self'? The answer is nowhere, because the self is not a thing, but as Jerome Brunner says, 'a point of view that unifies the flow of experience into a coherent narrative' ― a narrative striving to connect with other narratives and become richer."
And all these narratives form a unique pattern that defines who we are to ourselves. Others see our pattern and define us by how our pattern intermeshes with their own respective patterns. We do not really exist without this pattern of relationships. In short, we do not exist without one another.
Interesting, but so what? How do these abstract insights help you become a more effective leader? Because these insights, once internalized, lead directly to those characteristics that mark great leadership, two of which are humility and service.
For example, these insights lead directly to a sense of deep humility because you realize that there is nothing you can do to stop your own death. It is truly God's will that is allowing you to live on. You also recognize that your life is due to others with whom you build a pattern of relationships. You are not an island.
Once you really internalize these insights, you will be awestruck with absolute humility and desire to serve others because it actually means serving yourself. In Jim Collins' original Harvard Business Review article (2001), the great leaders he uses as examples have all undergone significant life experiences that may have triggered the recognition of impermanence and selflessness.
``Darwin Smith fully blossomed as a Level 5 after his near-death experience with cancer … Joe Cullman was profoundly affected by his World War II experiences, particularly the last-minute change of orders that took him off a doomed ship on which he surely would have died. Colman Mockler, for example, converted to evangelical Christianity while getting his MBA at Harvard … and became a prime mover in a group of Boston business executives that met frequently over breakfast to discuss the carryover of religious values to corporate life."
As with humility and service, it is possible to extrapolate other great leadership traits ― such as strong discipline, self-control and emotional intelligence ― from the internalization of the two basic Tao of Leadership principles. It is still a challenge to speak of Tao's mysticism and leadership in the same sentence.
But one thing is for sure: they are intrinsically interrelated. We will soon see a day when Tao of Leadership will take its place alongside Daniel Goleman's concept of Emotional Intelligence, because they both tie directly to measurable business results.
Jason Lim was the 2007 to 2008 fellow at Harvard Korea Institute. He can be reached at jasonlim2000@gmail.com.