“In Here” not “Out There”
About a year back, we launched a new program at the MIT Club of Northern California titled: Exploring the Mind of the Leader, anchored by Prof. Michael Ray of Stanford Graduate School of Business. In that series, Prof. Ray interviewed some well-known leaders like John Morgridge, Chairman of Cisco and Carol Bartz, CEO of Autodesk. The goal was to collect nuggets on Leadership Development.
Prof. Ray is a very interesting character. He teaches a famous course at Stanford called “Creativity in Business” and has a book by the same name. One of his fundamental thesis on creativity and leadership is succinctly characterized by Bill Carter as “Let go and Let God”. My friend Scott Globus and I spent a lot of time researching and getting to know Michael, and concluded that he was our man, because he had something to say which both Scott and I fundamentally agreed with: Serenity is a greater source of creativity than rampant motion. Such motion, we believe, generates only Brownian Motion, ie. Motion without Energy.
This morning, Bill wrote me an email at 6:00 AM: “In the West we have come to lack a sense of mystery partly because everything interesting is supposed to be out there rather than in here, and partly because we in the United States lack a sense of history infecting every moment which is there in Europe and Asia (and probably Latin America about which I know very little). This is the personal and collective depth dimension lacking in Silicon Valley, for instance.” I invite you to read Bill’s full email.
