Leadership Philosophy
© 2011 Mesa Research Group
The purpose of the Integrated Leadership Program is to develop leaders who can facilitate a “third space” for creatively mediating the demands of diverse operating logics and generating sustainable value creation.
Bridging Differing Operating Logics: In roles addressing the gap between what has worked in the past and an uncertain future, global leaders operate in the gray space of unformed understanding. Rather than holding to their particular orientation as the superior approach, they face the challenge of finding a third space to simultaneously hold different operating logics or worldviews that often clash like competing values. In this space much is risked because it requires openness in pursuit of mutuality, but much is possible in the reconciliation of differences through the emergence of successively more complex principles for organizing experience. The movement from thinking and speaking from positions of implicit assumptions to nonjudgmental awareness of these assumptions opens new horizons, the very means to greater creativity and innovation. The result is a more comprehensive view of individual and collective identity, purpose, and capacity.
Sustainable Value Creation: The enduring value of any collective endeavor is not merely its financial performance. Like the question posed to hard-charging executives about how they will be remembered after they are gone, organizations similarly have to consider their legacy. The relationship of business and society has never been more at risk and yet never more full of promise. The urgent vision facing corporations is sustainable value creation, a self-reinforcing state of ethical AND trustworthy behavior that delivers economic and social value.
It is easy to be cynical about the marriage of profitability and social impact until we view our activities from a larger, multi-generational context. The short-term focus on financial performance can result in self-destructive behavior to the detriment of all involved, such as the recent instability of the global financial system. At the same time, the one-sided pursuit of shareholder value has led to increased emphasis among employees of “work/life balance”, an allusion to the search for greater personal integration. It is not without relevance that a former chief scientist at a Fortune 100 company remarked, “the job of leadership today is not just to make money . . . it is to make meaning.”
