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.