Reo at Harvard 8
Leadership is defined by Professor Dean Williams at Harvard Kennedy School as follows.
LEADERSHIP is the PROCESS of mobilizing people in complex systems to confront and deal with problematic realities for the purpose of improving the human condition and generating progress.
He clearly distinguishes Leadership from Authority. Authority is a position, but Leadership is a process, a practice, or an activity.
For example, Prime Minister, President, CEO, Principal, or Captain, those are all a position in a respective organization, school, or team. Many people unconsciously assume people in those positions (or authorities) to play a leadership role, especially when they face a challenge or a difficulty. In Dean's definition, however, leadership could or should be exercised by anyone in an organization or team.
I think this is quite counter-intuitive but significantly important when we think of Adaptive Leadership.
Professor Dean Williams is the author of "Real Leadership." The book was translated and published in Japan last year.
Reo at Harvard 7
A leadership lesson which I learned at Harvard today:
If you want to go fast, go alone.
If you want to go far, go together.
Collaboration is one of the most important elements of leadership, and it enables us to keep adaptive and flexible.
I have also read this proverb in Al Gore's book "Our Choice" before.
Reo at Harvard 6
GAGA-SAMA WILL COME TO HARVARD.
Lady Gaga will come to Harvard on February 29 to announce the launch of her and her mother's foundation, The Born This Way Foundation. According to her mom, Cynthia Germanotta, the foundation will deal with creating a better world, especially focusing on young people.
Lady Gaga was one of the first celebrities to express the strong support for the Tohoku Earthquake last March, and became extremely popular among Japanese people. I enjoyed watching her sing in The Red and White Singing Contest, the most popular TV program in Japan, on the new year's eve.
I do not know any special relationships between Lady Gaga and Harvard, but it sounds very interesting.
Reo at Harvard 5
The 10-day intensive course "Leadership on the Line" by Professor Ronald Heifetz at Harvard Kennedy School has ended. The course was held from 9:00 am to 5:30 pm each day from January 3 to January 13 except Sunday. Before starting the course, I thought that the course might be too intensive to efficiently learn. But after starting the course, such a concern was soon blown away, and in the end it was far beyond my expectation.
This course is based on a couple of assumptions. One is that human beings are programmed by a lot of wisdoms brought by our ancestors, our communities, and our professional experiences. We unconsciously make a decision based upon our conventional wisdoms. In most cases, the decision making process works well. But when we face a new-type of challenge, which needs adaptive leadership, the process based on conventional wisdoms does not function well.
Another assumption is that people often confuse their roles and their self-identity. For example in my case, I have a lot of roles such as a man, a Japanese, a husband, a parent, a son, an uncle, a student, a former CEO, an entrepreneur, an marketing professional, and a yacht sailor. When we deeply committed ourselves to one role, we easily tend to confuse the role with ourselves, which make us vulnerable to any leadership challenges.
Thus, during the 10 days, we have been asked to search for an answer to a philosophical question.
"Who am I?"
If we can identify ourselves apart from our roles and can anchor ourselves well, we can keep our spirit alive to make a difference for the world.
These concepts are sometimes quite counterintuitive and difficult to understand and exercise, but those are also profound and meaningful. It was really an amazing leadership program.
Reo at Harvard 4
I had a good news. I was admitted as Associate by Harvard's U.S.-Japan Relations Program. So I will continue my research about leadership development in the next academic year at Harvard. The U.S.-Japan program is founded in 1980 in order to deal with the development of relations between the U.S. and Japan, and has an outstanding alumni network such as Ban Ki-Moon, Hisashi Owada, and Heizo Takenaka.
At the U.S.-Japan program, I plan to assess the applicability of a great variety of education methods of leadership development in the U.S. to Japanese society and develop a Japanese model of effective leadership education.
In Japan, despite the fact that the country has become infamous for its significant lack of leadership over the last two decades, academic concepts of leadership have not been widely established and thus no formal leadership education has been offered so far. As the current leadership challenges in Japan are acute, it is time for Japan to strengthen its people's leadership capabilities through a practical leadership education model.
I believe this research has a highly meaningful potential for future leadership education in Japan. I am very excited about it.
Reo at Harvard 3
The January semester started from January 3rd. In this semester, I decided to attend a 10-day intensive program titled "Leadership on the line" taught by Professor Ronald Heifetz. It is a supplemental course to "Exercising Leadership: The Politics of Change" taught by the same professor in the fall semester. His courses are ones of the most popular courses at Harvard Kennedy School. Around 120 students learn from 9:00am to 5:30pm everyday from January 3rd to 13th except Sunday.
In this course, we learn how dangerous to lead is, and how to stay alive when leading. I agree with this course concept. Every leader has to understand the risk to lead.
The students are very diversified from public to private, from young graduate students to a former CEO of a large automobile company. There are also a lot of cross registered students from MIT and other Harvard programs. It is an amazing environment to learn and experience leadership skills. Today, we analyzed four cases in a small group. This is the same amount that we had learnt for one month in the last fall semester. It was like a boot camp.
Reo at Harvard 2
I have received a lot of comments regarding my messages in my new year card. This year I commented that I have strived to learn a latest leadership theory called "Adaptive Leadership" at Harvard, and my theme is how we, as an individual and as an organization, should adapt to an unprecedented challenge which the existing technical solutions do not work.
The nuclear disaster in Fukushima is an adaptive leadership challenge. The huge amount of government deficit unparalleled in the world is also an adaptive challenge to Japan. We blindly tend to rely on traditional central authorities such as Prime Minister or CEO of a company to solve those challenges, but unfortunately those authorities by themselves cannot solve the challenges. Instead, we, all the people in charge, have to cope with those challenges altogether. I think "Adaptive Leadership" is the theory that Japan now the most needs.
Reo at Harvard 1
We have just entered into 2012 around a couple of hours ago here in Boston. I wish all of you a HAPPY NEW YEAR!
From this year, I will post my journals in English. When I decided to attend Harvard, the webmasters of Dentsu Razorfish asked me to do so, but I did not. So, it is now a good time for me to change my mind and style here.
Yesterday, my family was invited a home party by a Bangladeshi friend. He said to me, "As it would be a casual potluck party, please feel free to come." But it wasn't. It was a special dinner only for us. He cooked several wonderful dishes from Indian to Chinese and prepared a lot of fruits and cakes for my kids. It was a wonderful ending event of 2011 at Harvard for my family.
We discussed a lot of social problems in both countries, in the US, and in the world. I touched a gender inequality in Japan. We do not have female leaders either in business or politics. But many admit that Japanese female is actually more competitive and capable in the world than Japanese male. Japan should have effectively utilize their capabilities.
He referred a much more serious, actually unbelievable to me, reality of gender inequality in the world; honor killings. According to Wikipedia, "An honor killing or honour killing is the homicide of a member of a family or social group by other members, due to the belief of the perpetrators that the victim has brought dishonor upon the family or community. Honor killings are directed mostly against women and girls, but have been extended to men."
I guess most people think that it is totally a human rights violation and not acceptable at all, but it is happening even in the U.S. and Europe. Believe it or not, I have learnt that the same kind of act was legally acceptable in many regions in Japan until 19th century.
There are now a lot of ethnic conflicts happening in the world. Many people believe that Japanese are a homogenous race, and Japan does not have any ethnic conflicts. But it is not true. Japanese are not homogenous, but Japan had some indigenous people especially in the northern and southern parts. I am sure a lot of conflicts occurred in the past. We have just not had a lot of chances to learn about them at school. The only difference between the ethnic conflicts in Japan and in different countries is the time, a couple of hundreds years ago and now. Human civilization has faced similar issues throughout its history.
What is the solution? It is education. That was an agreement we reached last night. Especially, female education will be a key, because women have to know that they tend to be more oppressed in the world, but at the same time they are the first and most intimate educators of children. In order to correct and innovate our values in the next generation, female education would be one of the key solutions.
Our world is getting more complicated, but we have to overcome. And Japan has to revive from the earthquake disaster last year. We have to make the year 2012 a very important step for the world and Japan.