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The Leader Within You
Master 9 Powers to Be the Leader You Always Wanted to Be

Foreword by Tommy Lasorda

I have looked at Bob Danzig’s lineup and I wouldn’t change a thing. The lineup is strong from top to bottom.

I know a couple of his heavy hitters from my own field, baseball. Ted Turner didn’t make his fortune from owning the Atlanta Braves, he didn’t flinch in the early years when the crowds were small and the red ink was rising. But the Braves became the team of the ‘90s, and Ted would have fun counting his money, if he was the kind of guy who kept count. He isn’t.

Wayne Huizenga founded Blockbuster Video, so he knows what it is to win big. Still, my guess is that he found out the real meaning of the phrase, “the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat,” from owning the Florida Marlins.

This brings us to a point that you will find elsewhere in these pages, but on that bears repeating. Leaders come in all types, all ages and sizes, and in different temperaments. The one quality they have in common, and without which anyone who tries to lead is doomed to fail, is confidence.

I’m lucky because I had plenty when I had nothing else. If you know who you are, and you believe in what you are doing and the company you are doing it for, other people will know it. They will follow you.

All I ever wanted in my professional life was to pitch for the Dodgers, and then to manage the Dodgers. I missed on the first goal, but it didn’t’ stop me from succeeding on the second.

They were the Brooklyn Dodgers when I got what I knew would be my last chance to make the team, in May of 1955. The manager was Walter Alston, the man I would succeed twenty-two years later.

Alston had suspended Don Newcombe because he refused to throw batting practice. So he needs a last minute replacement to start against the St. Louis Cardinals. Who gets the start? Right. It’s me. I walk a guy. A pitch gets away form my catcher, Roy Campanella. I walk another batter, Bill Virdon. Another pitch gets away. Two out, none on and I’m working on a hitter. His name is Stan Musial. A third pitch gets away. Now the runner on third comes roaring home.

Now I’m fighting for my job. There is no way he is going to score without having to cut me in half. He hits me like a truck; a pretty rugged country ball player named Wally Moon. The run scores. I strike out Musial. I strike out Rip Repulski. I get out the inning, and in the dugout they notice my uniform is getting red around one knee.

The team has a doctor near the dugout. He examines the knee and tells me I’m through for the day. He said, “Son, if you try to pitch on that knee you may never pitch again. You’ve been spiked so badly, every tendon and ligament is exposed.”

Not long after, the front office sent me to the minors. Before I left, I made one last appeal to Bussie Bavasi, the general manager, and he said: “Put yourself in my chair; who would you send out?”

I told him, “There’s a kid lefthander on this club who can’t even throw a damned strike.” Bavasi said, “Maybe, but the kid lefthander was paid a bonus to sign and the rule is that a bonus baby has to stick with the big club for two years, or else you lose him.”

The name of the bonus kid who couldn’t throw a strike was Sandy Koufax. Getting shipped out to the minors hurt much worse than getting spiked. But I always said, it took the greatest lefthander in history to get me off the Dodgers.

There are executives who tell their stories, in this book, that will cover the full range of what it take to be a leader. My list might be a little different from anyone else’s, but mine would include pride, loyalty, a sense of humor and persistence.

I once asked Pee Wee Reese where he would have rated me among the 25 Dodger ball players in 1955, as a prospect to manage a big league club. Pee Wee said 24th, and that was because one guy, Sandy Amoros, didn’t speak English.

I proved a lot of people wrong and I did so for twenty years. We went to the World Series four times and won it twice. I was lucky to have the players I had, and luckier to have the only job I ever wanted. Between myself and Walter Alston, the Dodgers had only two managers in forty-five years. This was an incredible run, when you consider that neither of us ever had a contract longer than one season. The O’Malleys, Walter and his son, Peter, didn’t give long-term contracts—and didn’t’ fire people on a whim.

There is a pretty good leadership lesson right there.

 Preface

It has been my observation that, although leadership qualities may be inherent, the so-called “born leaders” are really those who spent their lives as works in progress. It is the “formed leader” who lights the way through example.

The oak tree is formed from the acorn;  we’re formed via the effects our home, education, work, peers, relatives, friends and environment have on us. All are stepping stones to help us cross the water ways of life. We may be born with leadership powers, but without the proper development, their potential may be blunted. You can wait to be formed or you can take an active role in your own creation by being open and receptive to those around you, who share the qualities of their leadership. Take a moment to think about people who have influenced you and why you think this is so. Why do you remember certain people or mentors from your early years?

Throughout school, college and graduate work, we are about learning, about obtaining the credentials necessary to become part of the American workplace. Once there, the next step is to learn skills that will prepare us to be managers. These learning steps are largely reflective of what people have done all their lives, since kindergarten; they have learned skills, aptitudes and information to move them to the next plateau.

The wonder of your inherent leadership characteristics is that they do not need to be learned. They are innate; they only need to be formed, nurtured and cultivated.

All of us have the leadership powers, which allow of us to lead our lives in a more effective and satisfying way, within us. Once identified and activated, these freshly-honed characteristics within our individual acorn can result in our becoming leaders, and will dramatically change the kind of people we are.

In our historic culture of progress and growth, I believe, the core lubricant for growing your personal oak tree is nourishment of the leader within you. Through my experiences, I’ve come to view leadership as a series of powers that do not have to be learned, because the potential for leadership is within every single person, regardless of age, background or position. Whether you’re focused on living your own life with greater serenity, on your way to middle-management, or beaming your eyes on the prize of leading others effectively—you can better achieve your ultimate goals by nurturing the leader within you.

My career in the newspaper business—and with Hearst—began nearly fifty years ago when I was office boy at the Albany Times Union, in upstate New York. Nineteen years after I walked in the door, in 1969, I was named publisher of that newspaper, and shortly after, became the youngest person to lead the New York State Publishers’ Association. As senior executive guiding all Hearst newspapers for the past two decades, I’ve been privileged to be at the helm of one of the top ten newspaper companies in the nation. In that time, we’ve experienced a renaissance of talent, technology, and reputation. During this expansion, newspaper acquisition investments have exceeded more than three-quarters of a billion dollars. I believe that our newspapers are positioned as they are today—perched for further success in the new millennium—because we have encouraged the development of the leadership qualities and characteristics inherent in so many of my colleagues.

My positions and experiences have given me the unique opportunity to have personal contacts with some of the most influential leaders of our time. The media that I have immersed myself in for nearly half a century has given me access to leaders at the top of their chosen fields. My personal experiences have enabled me to observe leaders, who, in turn, have provided me insights to a unique power of leadership reflected within them.

From the smallest business to the world’s institutional giants, all depend on leaders for guidance and direction; everyone has the natural equipment to lead, to impact their personal future and, perhaps, the destiny of others.

In the past few years, I’ve taken my leadership message on the road and have addressed enthusiastic audiences in corporate and university settings. Whether I’m addressing a group at Harvard University, an audience of managers in the mid-West, or a business class at the New School, people are intensely curious about their own leadership capabilities and potentials. Whether it’s Cambridge or Kansas, this is a topic that resonates in the hearts and minds of people of all ages.

The wide range of people I meet are uniformly grateful for the opportunity to have someone address their own unique leadership potentials. Most people are hungry to bring positive change into their lives. My message of leadership possibility is simple and accessible to all who are open to receive it.

For example, many have never really thought of what the characteristic of quality means to them, but a short time after we discuss it, they want to develop that personal attribute, not only for themselves, but for friends, family and colleagues. They recognize that this is powerful characteristic, once actively shared, will make others aware of their own leader impulses within.

I’ve tapped into a genuine appetite in the marketplace for personal change and the recognition that all people have the potential to be leaders, if only in the attitudes about how they lead their own lives.

The Leader Within You has a straightforward objective: to encourage people to be active participants in shaping their own future through self-knowledge, and reflections about how we’ve all been indelibly touched by people who have crossed our paths. These threads of life, accidental or not, bring us into contact with people who have the ability to enhance our lives and to help us weave a more brilliant tapestry of our own life stories, in subtle or ever-lasting ways.

My belief is simple: By spotlighting the leaders who have crossed my path, you, the reader, will be able to identify your most important leader—the leader within. 

Introduction

The Science of Management
The Art of Leadership

For the past half decade, may of us have had the feeling of leaving the table a little bit hungry; the “management meal” we’ve been served has not quite hit the spot with its limited menu of retrenchment and competitive down-sizing. It is so palpable that people at large are hungering to see the ingredients of leadership join us at the table. Every single person can be encouraged to trigger a new awareness that encourages those leadership qualities to shine. That fresh insight can benefit each individual and have rippling effects for those who are in positions of promise.

Over the last five years or so, many thoughtful observers believe our nation has endured a period of extraordinary emphasis on the science of management, resulting from the very real concerns that accompany a changing society. As we’ve moved toward the millennium, we’ve experienced changing global requirement for more competitive businesses and institutions, which have often resulted in employee downsizing and restructuring. This has been true not just for businesses, but for hospitals, institutions of education and the arts as well. Everyone has had to respond to a changing economic environment and the main response has been weighted toward the science of management—measuring, allocating and directing our human resources.

With all this focus on the smaller management picture, the larger leadership picture—and what institution is not itself comprised of big and little pictures—has lost its focus. If the inordinate emphasis of an organization is on the management of resources, the downsizing of employment, the farewell to businesses that can no longer contribute as they have in the past—if that’s all that is done, then the spirit and soul of that enterprise is going to be diminished.

Management is an essential fundamental requirement of the operation of all civil societies, including business, health care, arts and educational institutions. We cannot deliver 10 million Hearst newspapers to readers each week without carefully calibrated and managed process. Management is of the utmost importance. However, when separating the two like strands of a rope wound tightly together, the discreet elements suggest that management is about today and leadership is about tomorrow. Management is a series of learned attributes; leadership relies on inherent capabilities. Management is about process; leadership illuminates vision and promise.

Put another way, all leaders are also managers of others. But not all managers exercise the qualities of leadership.

If this sounds a bit too simple, examine for a moment that rope of leadership. Or think of it like those strands of DNA that are found in your genes. When you were born you had within you the capacity for all of the common powers of leadership in this book. They do not have to be learned because they belong to your being even though they may lie dormant forever until you exercise them.

Dance pioneer Martha Graham used to say, “Everyone is born with genius, but most people lose it after fifteen minutes.” Allow me to replace the word genius with leadership. Both words to me are synonymous with people who know themselves and choose to release all their shining qualities within. Perhaps that’s what really makes a genius—the ability to know oneself so well you send out an inspirational beam just like a lighthouse.

Let me outline a few reflections on the results of reliance so weighted on the scale to the science of management:

• A nation of employment drifters with no long term sense of institutional loyalty is not a nation that cultivates progress.
• An atmosphere of fear of impending joblessness is not an atmosphere that motivates risk.
• The priorities that inspire momentum must include more than becoming the smallest possible entity of human endeavor.

Progress. Risk. Momentum. Where would you or we be without them?

Many in the American workforce have been traumatized, victims of the excessive reliance on the science of management. It is timely to address the issue of how the nation’s free enterprise structure is answering the questions—Now what? What’s next?

I see the cultivation of the art of leadership as the balancing answer on the scale to ignite loyalty to purpose, creative risk-taking and momentum with velocity.

Indeed, while management preserves, and can build some short term economic progress, it is leadership that infuses the dreams, inspires the visions, and causes people to respond with vigor for the long haul. The science of management cannot be expected to unleash human potential. Your personal life can be managed efficiently, yet lack the rich satisfaction of being lead well. It is leadership that paints a broader vision and inspires people to join in the acquisition and fulfillment of that vision, by lubricating each individual’s creative capabilities.

I perceive the maintenance of organizations and the required functioning on a day-to-day basis to be achieved by management; it is the essential glue to the calibrated process every business requires. Leadership, however, is what builds greatness in people and institutions.

*          *          *

The following queries are offered to help navigate the crossing from sterile management to true leadership.
           

• What are the tools to cross the bridge from the management which aims to achieve an organization’s leanness and so called competitive fighting weight, to the spirited leadership, that builds institutional greatness?
• Can you stimulate your colleagues to climb the higher mountains of success now that you and they know how to measure the mountains and allocate the precise resources of human and equipment needs for the tasks at hand?
• Can you motivate a well-managed but perhaps cynical staff to believe in and participate in “growing” your future together?
• Is the art of leadership nourishing the spirit and soul of your workplace?

In the final analysis, only a motivated people can participate in expanding the innovation highway that stretches the boundaries of the possible for the people, businesses and institutions which will shine in the future. That motivation is vested in the leader. It is not found in bricks or budgets. It resides in the visions of the leaders who are the architects of tomorrow—they master the following nine leadership powers that are within them and within you.

1. QUALITY
2. INNOVATION
3. INSPIRATION
4. PERSEVERANCE
5. PASSION
6. CHARACTER
7. CHARISMA
8. ENERGY
9. ENTHUSIASM

A Mind’s Eye Picture

This is the anatomy of leadership I have observed. Sometimes I think it resembles the clear pages in an old Gray’s Anatomy textbook—one of those cellophane inserts where the complete picture of a man (or woman) is formed only after the proper number of pages have been turned, one on top of the other. The first page might give you only the outline of a man, but after turning half a dozen or so pages, all the vital parts—blood, tissue, the works—of a human being are filled in. Anything less than the whole picture is worthless.

The nine powers listed are essential to the spirit that can renew and re-ignite the inventiveness, determination, fidelity and sense of opportunity which inspire workers of the nation. What’s more, these nine powers of leadership are inherent in everyone; the promise to live a life of greater satisfaction pulses in you and every individual. You have the ability to nourish those inherent leadership abilities as you progress through each stage of your life. That is a two-fold gift: by wakening the leader within, you can inspire the leader without. See if by focusing on your own leadership characteristics, you don’t find yourself leading your own life more successfully. That promise is profound.

Although everyone can identify other characteristics they admire in leaders, the odds are high that those individuals also have the common powers identified here. The good news for all who have the opportunity to build a life ripe with success for today and tomorrow is that these are inherent gifts that everyone can cultivate and use.

But what about those qualities that cannot be so readily identified, for example, soul. It breathes in the lungs of leaders and flows in their blood. It won’t show up in an x-ray and a blood test won’t indicate the level of soul that’s circulating in the body. You can’t go to the gym to firm up your soul by climbing a soul-master. What exactly is soul and how does it relate to leadership, business and work?

Spirit, belonging, individual identity, a sense of worthiness, control, and competency are self-esteem essentials in the view of noted author Dennis Weatley; the soul of any individual, as well as any organization is manifest in the collective self-esteem of that entity. Morale, cohesion, achievement, and quantum leaps of breakthrough thinking, are all reflections of the soul of the enterprise. At the end of the day, it is the leader who cultivate and nourishes his own and the collective organizational spirit. Managers can speak to the body of the structure. It is the leader who nurtures its soul.

In the pages that follow, we will “walk the walk” with successful people who have crossed our path—each of whom has exhibited, Quality, Innovation, Inspiration, Perseverance, Passion, Character, Charisma, Energy and Enthusiasm. Some have been subtle threads in the tapestry of my life, others more complete patterns of brilliant mosaics which have come my way. Some are less known. Others are towering confirmations of public success. All are typical of many people the reader has known.