Leaders and Minds

There are great leaders and there are great minds, and often enough the two are found within the same person (although, alas, not always). I love studying greatness in any domain, from the past or the present. It doesn’t change over time or space, which is what makes it interesting. If you could distill certain qualities possessed by the Great and perhaps develop them in yourself, then in theory it should be possible to become that very thing - hence the abundance of books on leadership.

My first book of the week is a rather practical choice, recommended at a PLA session on becoming a leader. In my new job, I have a lot to do and a lot to prove, and I thought Michael Watkins’s book, The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels , would help. It will. Basically the book talks about how to create momentum in your organization during the first (and very pivotal) three months after you get the position. Watkins talks about accelerating your learning, securing early wins, building your team and creating coalitions, among other things. I must admit that I voraciously took notes, and will have my managers read it as well, as it is sure to assist them.

In keeping with this theme and the Benjamin Franklin one I mentioned in an earlier post, I also read Atlantic Cousins: Benjamin Franklin and His Visionary Friends by Jack Fruchtman Jr. This is a collective biography of some of the people with whom Franklin corresponded in three countries: America, Britain, and of course, France. The choice of people to write about was wide open, as Franklin spent inordinate amounts of time sending letters back and forth across the pond. Because of that, I found some of the selections rather weird (like Franz-Anton Mesmer), but that didn’t at all detract from the book. The author succeeded if he wanted to demonstrate the Enlightenment penchant to dip into many pots (politics, science, abolition, health, business, letters, etc.) and more importantly, to share findings with others.

I have become completely enamored with this era and the people who made it happen. So much has come from groups of intelligent people who decided to get together and discuss ideas, feeding off one another’s energy. These creative and brilliant clusters could be found throughout history, and all are deeply fascinating. Take ancient Athens, 1950s France, 1820s New England, and the Bloomsbury group in the early 20th century, just to give four random examples. I could read about them all day. Come to think of it, I have. This is the kind of thing I live for, and the kind of environment I am trying to foster in the library. The team I work with is just extraordinary and our brainstorming sessions inspire and invigorate us all. It doesn’t even feel like work, although we get a lot done.

I’ll leave you with this thought on a Saturday night: imagine what more could have been if all the aforementioned groups would have only had the Internet. Wow.

Comments

[Dad]

One of the more intense 'gatherings of genius' was the Rive Gauche group of primarily American expatriots, the so-called Lost Generation that found itself anchored in Montparnasse (Paris) in the early 1920s. Hanging around Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookshop were Ernest Hemingway, Zelda and F.Scott Fitzgerald, Thorton Wilder, William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, Archibald MacLeish, Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Irishman James Joyce, and numerous others of note. They kept company with the likes of local avant-garde painters Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Georges Braque. Somehow, I find the ex-pats a more interesting bunch than, say, the existentialist Sartre – Camus – de Beauvoir crowd of 1950s Paris. They certainly merit inclusion in your listing of ‘creative clusters’.

[Quillhill]

Wait a second--are you suggesting the internet has not always been around since the dawn of man? Just to take one example, how did Magellan ever sail around the world without MapQuest?