5650 Grad assignment

Prologue

Leading Out Loud is a continuing story of the discovery and documentation of the distinct field of leadership communication. My thinking on this began in the early 1990s on a rock in Northern California, where three or four evenings a week I would sit under a darkening sky and write about my experience of consulting with executives and politicians. On Fridays, I would teach a leadership communication elective at the Haas Graduate School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. More often than not, the content for any given class would come right out of my experience of the preceding week. It was not a very scholarly process by academic standards, but it seemed important to the students; they were completely engaged and continued to make the course a popular, hard-to-get ticket. What I had stumbled and bumbled onto was a coin of the realm for inspiration, and I had

applied it with some discipline to the field of leadership. It turned out to be difficult to articulate, and even more difficult to teach. After I spoke at Stanford University’s Executive Breakfast in 1992, one of the faculty asked me to identify the sources of my body of work. I was not even sophisticated enough in those days to understand that his question went to the heart of academic credibility. The only names I could think of wrote in fields seemingly far from the practical day-to-day world of business or politics. Rather, they wrote on philosophy, religion, and literature, most of it with a strong mystical bent reaching inside the metaphysical, and that perspective oriented much of my work. Fortunately, I had a history in operational business and politics, having had my hands on the levers of a few organizations, so I was confident in the practicality of the work. That was twenty years ago, and my credentials have improved in the interim. But without that original naïveté, I probably would not have had the courage to write at all. Leading Out Loud deals with leadership communication as a unique practice, separate from

our ability to merely get things done. It deals in our ability to lead—measured not only by our competence and what we accomplish but primarily by our ability to communicate who we are and what we stand for in this life. In 1995, according to Books in Print, the words authentic and leader appeared together only

in one work, Authentic Leadership by Robert Terry. Dr. Terry’s work was an inspiration to me, so the word authentic was in the subtitle of the first edition of Leading Out Loud; I believe it was only the second work to use the two terms together. Today, seventeen years later, a Google search on the phrase “authentic leadership” yields 1,810,000 hits. In fact, at a recent conference in San Francisco, someone asked, “What word do you wish would disappear from the leadership lexicon?” One of my table mates immediately said, “authentic.” The comment might indicate that the once-novel term “authentic leadership” has become a cliché. Yet clichés are born of truth. Authenticity—knowing your values and being able to communicate through their prism—is central to leadership communication. Shortly after the book’s publication in 1995, the principles of Leading Out Loud were

Pearce, T. (2013). Leading out loud : A guide for engaging others in creating the future. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. Created from ambertonlibrary-ebooks on 2022-01-28 18:03:33.

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incorporated into an intensive executive course on authentic communication currently represented and sold by BlessingWhite, one of the leading leadership consulting companies in the world. Participants in the course come to understand the personal nature of leadership and focus on the development of a broad-gauged and deep Communication Guide. This requires introspection, courage, and persistence. It requires finding and building the courage to not only give voice to the change message but also to develop the skill of connecting with others in a way that will inspire them to engage with the ideas and passion of the leader. Since its inception, this program has reached thousands of leaders and potential leaders of

all stripes in all parts of the world. Through the coursework, my classes at the Haas School of Business and the London Business School, my work with individuals, and the worldwide incorporation of these principles by BlessingWhite, we have seen leaders emerge, each from a personal crucible of life, to find new ways of expressing themselves and new ways of engaging others in efforts to make the world a better place. The field of leadership communication has continued to expand, and others have contributed

immensely to its legitimacy. Many excellent scholars and practitioners have now included a perspective on communication in the body of other works on leadership. Nonetheless, actual understanding of the full nature of communication from one human to others—the elements, objective and sublime, of such communication—have been and remain obscure. When we add the kicker of inspiration and its universality, our understanding is even more meager—in fact, it remains a mystery. The third edition of Leading Out Loud explores this mystery and adds insight and practical ideas to help leaders bridge that gap of understanding more completely. When I was writing the second edition, I was also encountering situations in teaching and

consulting that required more than a superficial understanding of what it meant to lead across cultures. At the time, popular training emphasized learning languages and differences in etiquette. I knew there was more to it than the blind application of social rules, but I found myself relying more on formulas than real insight, which felt neither accurate nor authentic. So after the book’s publication, I slowed my consulting business to a crawl and enrolled in a graduate program in comparative mythology, with an emphasis in depth psychology, at the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California. The campus archives house the library and papers of Joseph Campbell, as well as those of the late archetypal psychologists James Hillman, Marianne Woodman, and others. The school enjoys frequent visits by and engagement with Jungian scholars from around the world. I hope this edition reflects a more global perspective as a result of my education both at the Institute and in the world since. I was not exactly a neophyte in therapeutic access to the unconscious—in fact, I was experienced. But my exposure to this curriculum was the stuff of revelation to me. What goes on below the surface of our consciousness affects us far more than anything that reaches our awareness. The graduate school experience excited substantial curiosity about the nature of inspiration

itself. Accordingly, in 2006, I put together the Forum on Cross-Cultural Inspiration. More than seventy people came to San Francisco from several countries—professionals from social organizations, governments, business, the arts, and academia—to explore the subject for four days in group conversation looking through four distinct lenses—neurobiology, mythology,

Pearce, T. (2013). Leading out loud : A guide for engaging others in creating the future. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. Created from ambertonlibrary-ebooks on 2022-01-28 18:03:33.

C o p yr

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depth psychology, and spirituality. Throughout the forum, the focus was on action in the world —in business, politics, religion, and social service. The extensive white paper from those four days of work also informs this book. Finally, I’ve had twists and turns of my own that have made the depth of the material even

more important to me. I lost my thirty-one-year-old daughter Jodi to a brain aneurism in late 2007. She was one of the healthiest people I knew, and left a husband and two small children. Her cards and notes still grace the front of my refrigerator. As many of you know, death makes the urgency of life real, and I now have even less patience for manipulation and less-than- passionate leadership, or less-than-passionate living for that matter. Jodi is probably applauding that last sentence from somewhere, even as I write it. I realize that the arc of history is very long and very deep, and from the early shaman to the

modern scientist, our longings and impulses have been consistent, only the stories have changed. I know too that personal experience is singular—while it might point a finger in a certain direction, it does not provide a map for the universal. Accordingly, I’ve tried to shore up my assertions in a way that will facilitate your own experience. I know that the complexity of theory and practice can sound daunting (I know it does to me) yet some complexity and mystery is central to our understanding about what moves us. I hope this observation serves as an effective guide for your own understanding.

Pearce, T. (2013). Leading out loud : A guide for engaging others in creating the future. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. Created from ambertonlibrary-ebooks on 2022-01-28 18:03:33.

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 1 3 . Jo

h n W

ile y

& S

o n s,

I n co

rp o ra

te d . A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .