NPR interviewed Wilbur Ross this morning, in which he revealed that he had tried to be a creative writer in his student days. I found really interesting his answer to the question of what he had found useful from his creative writing training, however short-lived that was, to his work today as he takes over and revived failed companies. His answer was not ideation or any such thing, but “analytical skills” (!) When you have 1000 words to write a piece in, he said, you have to “organize your thought processes, organize your questions, and think through what your observations were.” He went on to say how these abilities are useful in any kind of activity that calls for analytical abilities, and especially in his work in the private equity space.

I won’t belabor how this fits the ISmarts-framework…..

Seven years ago. It was a non-teaching day for me at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. The cab driver who dropped me off at school from a breakfast meeting was from Kabul. He had NPR running, and we caught versions of the events on the 9 am news. Little did he or I know the dramatic change that would come upon the America we knew.

I remember the horror–the darn lump in my throat wouldn’t go away–as I watched the chaos unfold on TV. I had worked on Wall Street a few years ago, and knew the WTC quite well.

All we can do today, is to take a moment to reflect on the precious and innocent lives that were lost in the thousands that day. May they be blessed in every way.

At the bookstore, waiting for a friend, I picked up Mark Sanborn’s book, You Don’t Need a Title to be a Leader. “No, you don’t,” I said to myself smiling, as I thought about my Quotidian Leadership workshop. I liked the ideas in Sanborn’s book, and was familiar with his style, having read his “Fred book” before. In any case, I tried to think of how the six leadership principles that Sanborn discusses fit into the LSmarts 5-intelligences framework. (They say when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, but hey, on the flip side, isn’t is also true that when you want to put in a nail, everything looks like a hammer.)

Sanborn’s list includes 6 principles:

(i) Know yourself: good leaders understand their strengths and weaknesses first

(ii) Focus: excellent leadership has a laser-like focus on its goals

(iii) People: leadership must motivate people

(iv) Communication: good leaders use channels of communication that they keep open

(v) Execution: how leaders make the rubber meet the road, and

(vi) Giving: excellent leaders put others above self

Let’s see the 5 leadership intelligences from the LSmarts framework: Analytical, Inventive, Operational, Communicative, and Ethical LSmarts.

Clearly “Know Yourself” comes under the Analytical LSmarts, but so does “Focus” because Analytical LSmarts reflect an ability to monitor performance. “People” and “Communication” very obviously are powered by Communicative LSmarts, “Execution” relies on Operational LSmarts, and “Giving” is governed by Ethical LSmarts. What about Inventive LSmarts–the source of visionary leadership? Missing in Sanborn’s framework? Hmm… interesting.

I recently came across a very interesting question: Is leadership morally neutral? In other words, can we regard dictators or “heads” of fascist countries as leaders?

From the LSmarts perspective, here’s an answer:
One of the five intelligences in the LSmarts framework is called “Ethical LSmarts.” This intelligence reflects the person’s ability to recognize and act upon the ethical dimensions of an issue. It is not about the ethical beliefs of a leader or how ethical you perceive the leader to be. It is also not about doing “good work” (as in “the ethical mind” that Howard Gardner of Harvard has proposed.) Rather, this aspect of intelligence reflects how capable the leader is of recognizing and understanding the ethical implications of a new situation. Ethical LSmarts bestow upon the leader a capacity to understand the ethical standpoints of people who may not share his or her personal ethics. This aspect of leadership intelligence makes the difference between why somebody like Mahatma Gandhi or Abraham Lincoln is called a great leader and why somebody like Hitler is called a demagogue.

To answer the question then, leadership is definitely not morally neutral—great leaders display the ability to lift the question of ethics from that of the personal and transform it into the ethics of all of humanity. For a demonstration of this, watch Richard Attenborough’s movie, Gandhi. Toward the close, there is a scene that depicts Calcutta (now Kolkata) in the immediate aftermath of Hindu-Muslim religious riots that followed the partition of India. Gandhi went on a fast-unto-death if the riots did not end. The scene that I mention shows that the riots have stopped, and rioters are going by the house in which Gandhi lies. They are throwing down the arms they used in the riots in front of Gandhi who lies on a cot. Suddenly a Hindu man rushes toward Gandhi’s bed, throws a piece of bread at Gandhi, and orders him to eat it; the man then breaks down and tells Gandhi of how he killed a small Muslim boy because the Muslims killed his young son. Gandhi’s answer: “Adopt a Muslim boy the same age as your son, and bring him up as a Muslim.”

After many months of co-directing and volunteering (with my wife) on a child literacy project in Hyderabad, India through DukeEngage, I’m back. The project was exhilirating but also exhausting–apart from the literacy work in underpriviliged government schools, we were also  in charge of 8 Duke undergrads. But I would not trade it for anything. I learned many lessons for the ISmarts and LSmarts framework. I am back to innovation and leadership consulting and will blog regularly now.