Take That Risk

Music is one of my passions. I love listening to it, conducting it, and shaping it. Some time ago, I had the opportunity to take part in a musical production that was scored for full orchestra and choir. At rehearsal, I watched as the violins played, then the violas and the cellos, the double bass, and all the stringed instruments. Then the wind instruments came in, the horns, the bassoons, and so on. But right at the back, there were two people, one was playing the tympani and the other had two cymbals in his hand. It was interesting to watch them. They were so into the music. In fact, the guy playing the tympani was rocking back and forth on his heels, in complete sync with the beats and the rhythm of the music. When he played, there was always a rising crescendo of music. It was all so wonderful. The other guy with the cymbals had only a few measures to play in that entire movement, and he had to wait for those measures and play them exactly on cue and in step with the music. All that preparation was just for those few measures.

Circumstances - Give In Or Overcome

These days I've been thinking about circumstances – circumstances that come into our lives, surround us and sometimes force us to think differently about the things that we are doing. Often when circumstances, especially those working against what we are doing come along, we tend to second-guess ourselves and wonder whether it is a sign to either quit and do something different, or time to make some changes, or just give up. And we let the circumstances dictate the path of our lives, sometimes giving in too easily when we really ought to be saying: "I'm not going to let them alter the course of my life; I'm going to overcome them."  Does that get your attention?  Is that what's going on in your life?  Then stay with me and let's process those thoughts together.

I was reading an article by Chuck Givens. He talked about a time when he was on his way to conduct a workshop that was almost 200 miles away from his home. He said, "I left in plenty of time, looking forward to the drive, taking the tight mountain curves in my sports car. But unfortunately, on that particular day, my fan belt broke and the car began to overheat." He still decided to press on in the hope that he'd find a gas station where he could get a fan belt. But, within a few minutes, his engine seized and he was faced with another choice: should he call ahead and cancel the workshop or should he try someway to get to his destination.

Diverse Unity

Coming in to London yesterday, I was able to travel on the new 787 aircraft, the Dreamliner, an aircraft that I'd been wanting to travel on for quite some time. It was a wonderful experience – great legroom, big windows, and so on. But it was a long flight and towards the end of it, I was looking for things to do. So I went to the screen and looked at some of the games. One of them was: "What Kind of a Leader Are You?" it caught my attention and piqued my interest. So I went through all the questions asked and it was obvious that they were trying to see whether you were an authoritarian leader or one who worked with consensus.

It made me think about leadership and different styles. What kind of a leader are you? To understand leadership from one aspect, because there are so many aspects of leadership, I want us to look at the 1996 attempt that was made by two very experienced mountaineers, Rob Hall and Scott Fischer. They made the trip up to Mt. Everest along with several guides and 8 paying clients. Many of the members actually reached the summit on May 10^th. But here's the tragedy! On the descent, they encountered grave danger. In fact, 5 of them, including both those experienced leaders, Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, perished as they tried to descend the mountain during the night and during a storm. What a disaster! To be able to actually scale Mt. Everest and then perish on the way down.

More Than Just Coffee

I'm not sure how many of you frequent Starbucks here in India, but Howard Schultz, Chairman and CEO of Starbucks, is an inspiration. To read about some of the things that he has done, to look at some of the decisions that he has taken, are just so good in terms of the boldness, the enterprise, the innovation of the man, right from the time that he got into coffee, captured by this whole notion of finding a community place between home and office that people could come to and just sit and enjoy coffee and conversation with each other. Out of that birthed the Starbucks coffee houses. But also before that, going to Italy, going into coffee places there and seeing the way coffee was dealt with in Italy and trying to do the same thing in the US. This all spoke for his heart in creating a wonderful community that would be based around sipping coffee.

Yet, as we look at his life, if seems that as he got into Starbucks first as Director for Operations, left and came back again as CEO and then actually bought the company through local investors and was its Chairman for many years. When he gave up as CEO, he stayed on as Chairman. But right around 2007-2008, as Starbucks began to increase beyond any plan that they previously had – they were starting 7 new stores a day – they were mushrooming all over the place. Howard Schultz realized that they had lost their initial capacity to engage both the partners, or the baristas as the employees are called at Starbucks, but also the community, the consumers who were coming. He said that it almost seemed that there was a sense of loss in terms of what Starbucks had initially started out to do.