On August 13 and 14, 2010, I will be leading a unique seminar on “Mindful Leadership” in conjunction with an extraordinary teacher, Yongey Mingur Rinpoche, the well-known Tibetan Buddhist meditation master. This two-day retreat will be held at the Continuing Education Conference Center on the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul campus.
“Mindful Leadership” is the meeting of East and West as Mingyur Rinpoche and I explore the integration of the principles of Buddhist mindfulness meditation with True North leadership. This seminar represents a bold new paradigm in which meditation training is combined with leadership principles to develop mindful leaders dedicated to creating a more peaceful and harmonious world.
Each day will begin with the teaching of Mingyur Rinpoche, including experiential meditation, followed by interactive dialogue between the two leaders and participants, featuring these topics:
- Developing Self-Awareness
- Crucibles & Understanding Your Life Story
- Developing Self Esteem
- Mindful Meditation for Reflection and Introspection
- Shared Awareness through Group Support
- Leading Others Mindfully
- Self-Actualization & Creating A Better World
Over 150 leaders have already registered for this seminar. The cost is $195 for the two days, or $95 for students or seniors over 65. You may register here or at www.tergar.org. Out-of-town participants may want to consider staying at the Ramada Plaza Minneapolis, 1330 Industrial Blvd., Minneapolis, MN.
Posted Jul 10, 2010 by Bill George |
Filed in: Leadership
In Sunday’s World Cup finals billions of people will be watching Spain’s David Villa and the Netherlands’ Wesley Sneijder to see who will notch the winning goal. In spite of their brilliance, Villa and Sneijder aren’t the reason why these two European sides are in the final.
The real reason lies in the youth camps of Barcelona and Amsterdam’s Ajax, where young players learn the Spanish and Dutch way of playing soccer. Day after day they are taught the rigor of ball skills, passing, and shooting from the age of five until the select few that emerge are launched into the national team fifteen years later. These young players get the same level of top quality, consistent coaching day-after-day, supported by their country’s national coaches. In their spare time, you can see them on the local soccer fields practicing clever shots with swerving balls from every conceivable angle and challenging each other in two-vs.-two games.
The Spanish advantage is that the best of their players stay at home and play for Barcelona (7 starters) or Real Madrid (3 starters). They continue to develop what they learn in the youth camps with the same teammates and same style. The Germans also have a fabulous youth development program that is producing young players like Thomas Mueller, Bastian Schweinsteiger, and Mesut Ozil who play for Bayern Munich.
In contrast, American players go from parent coaches to club coaches to select team coaches to high school coaches to college coaches, all of whom have different styles and different views about how soccer should be played. No wonder young players are confused! They focus so much on winning youth games from the age of five that they never learn the basics of ball skills, clever passing, and creative shooting.
They get in lots of practices, but much of their time is spent standing in line doing drills their coach made up or in conditioning exercises. It is rare for them to just go out and play the game so they can learn to be creative. In contrast to the Europeans, American soccer fields are empty when there aren’t games or practices as American youth are overbooked with other activities.
Whereas the Spanish and the Dutch focus on player development, the Americans focus on player selection. But if you don’t develop your players, when it comes to selection, your choices are limited. That’s why American men’s coach Bob Bradley wound up selecting three of four strikers for the World Cup who hadn’t been part of the two-year U.S. ordeal of qualifying matches and friendly tournaments: he had very little to choose from. No wonder U.S. strikers failed to score a single goal in the four World Cup games. Wouldn’t Bradley love to have two strikers who sat on the bench for Spain against Germany: Fernando Torres and Cesc Fabregas.
It is fair game to criticize Bradley for his inability to adapt his tactics at the start of each game from the 1980s style of sitting back and watching how the game develops to the 2010 style of the great teams of going to goal from the opening whistle. That cost the U.S. early goals in every game except Algeria where we were saved by the crossbar. In retrospect, U.S. players did remarkably well to battle back in every game. With a little bit of luck, they could have wound up in the semi-finals.
But the real reason we didn’t advance further is that Bradley simply lacked the talent to choose from. So don’t blame him. Instead, look to the boss of U.S. Soccer, Sunil Gulati, who focuses more on choosing and critiquing coaches that he does in creating a youth development system.
American soccer today has fifty percent more youth players than any other sport. In a nation of 300 million people (versus five million in the Netherlands), you would think that America could produce top-level players like it does in every other sport. Obviously, we have the athletes with the speed, size, agility and strength to be world-class players. But we’ll never produce championship teams until we create a youth development system with consistent coaching.
Originally Published in the Star-Tribune on July 3, 2010
As a lifelong businessman, I was surprised to be invited to speak to the Association of Union Contractors last year. They told me they’re searching for “win-win” solutions between their members, the contractors and the owners. For many years they’d seen their membership shrink as owners turned instead to non-union contractors when costs rose to noncompetitive levels.
They recognized that union contractors had been badly hurt by the recession. Instead of continuing the battles through “win-lose” negotiations, they adopted a new approach. They decided to use their members’ expertise to work collaboratively with contractors and owners to find ways to improve construction quality and employee safety while reducing costs and time-to-completion. A win-win solution.
That got me to reflecting, isn’t this what leadership is all about? Isn’t it the ability to solve complex problems that single-minded groups couldn’t resolve by bringing together differing points of view to create win-win solutions? Isn’t this vastly superior to win-lose confrontations that result in damaged relationships, drawn-out strikes that hurt both sides and the inability to work together collaboratively?
Rarely do win-win solutions represent a decisive victory for a single viewpoint. Nor are win-win approaches about Washington-style political compromises in which all parties wrangle until both compromise sufficiently to reach an agreement that too often doesn’t solve basic problems and creates unanticipated consequences.
Rather, great leaders work together with people who represent diverse views to forge solutions that transcend immediate conflicts. Together they devise solutions that will be successful for all parties in the environment of the future. That’s the way great organizations are transformed in order to sustain their success, and the way they ensure superior service to their customers and clients.
IBM is a case in point. To overcome parochialism and traditional squabbles between business and geographical organizations, CEO Sam Palmisano converted IBM’s entire 400,000-employee organization from a geographic structure to an integrated global network, and from a task orientation to “leading by values.”
Palmisano insisted that functional managers and country managers alike give priority to customers scattered around the globe by sending their top people to customer sites instead of hoarding them for their own organizations. That led to a $500 million contract with China’s largest bank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, for a fully integrated information and communications network. Palmisano not only enlisted the collaborative support of hundreds of contractors, but insisted they adhere to IBM’s global business practices rather than following their local business traditions.
Other companies ranging from Cisco Systems to Exxon-Mobil, Novartis and Unilever are adopting similar approaches to create win-win solutions for their customers and prevent parochial issues from getting in the way.
The nurses contract
This brings to mind the contentious contract negotiations between the Minnesota Nurses Association and Twin Cities hospitals, where both sides seemed to be digging ever deeper holes for win-lose postures. Ironically, both sides in this dispute share a common goal: to provide superior care to patients.
Looking ahead to the new health care environment, three things are certain: 1) sharp reimbursement reductions for Medicare, Medicaid, and private health plans are coming; 2) to survive in this environment, quality of patient care must go up; and 3) costs must come down.
Nurses should be treated as professionals who are given opportunities to take on greater levels of responsibility in the new health care environment. Using nurses more effectively is vital to raising health care quality at reduced cost. It is well known how much patients value their relationships with their nurses, especially in the Twin Cities, which has one of the best records for patient care of any metropolitan area in the United States.
The nurses’ union and the hospitals reached a tentative agreement Thursday. But since they are both committed to patient care, nurses and hospitals could work together in the coming months to figure out how to improve patient care with higher quality outcomes at lower costs.
In the health care environment of the future, nurses should work in teams with doctors. This would require high levels of collaboration, increased knowledge and skills, and greater flexibility in assignments and scheduling, all of which would lead to increased opportunities for promotion and enhanced compensation.
A new approach
In this context restricting nurses to rigid schedules may be inconsistent with patient needs. This is especially true in the case of those invaluable nurses who engage in delivery of babies, life-altering surgeries, and the frequent emergencies that arise in hospitals. With these broadened professional responsibilities, strikes by nurses would become an anachronism, just like they would be if physicians walked off the job and left thousands of patients without essential medical care.
As we look at the major societal problems we face, it becomes clear that the win-lose approaches are not going to solve the intractable issues in education, in energy and the environment, and in pursuit of global peace. Instead, they are leading to greater conflicts, increased anger on all sides, and extended delays in moving forward to devise and implement workable solutions.
What if we apply the win-win approach to:
- Create more flexible approaches to educating K-12 students, enabling them to learn in their own ways and at their own pace, and ultimately prepare them better for the working world?
- Develop an integrated energy policy that recognizes the need for improved efficiency, reduced carbon emissions, and renewable energy sources, yet recognizes the vital role that fossil fuels will play for the foreseeable future?
- Devise peaceful solutions to intractable ethnic problems that acknowledge the interdependence of all sides and enable the people suffering from the disputes not only to live in peace, but to realize their material and spiritual goals at the same time?
Utopian? Not at all. We know that the consequences of win-lose negotiations mean that everyone loses. We have seen that win-win solutions enable both parties to flourish.
It’s time to give the win-win approach the opportunity to help us solve our most difficult problems.
