But that’s exactly what Romney has done.

What, you say? Paul Ryan, like him or not, is a person of substance, and Sarah Palin is, well, Sarah Palin. But if you look at why Romney chose Ryan, and why John McCain chose Palin, it becomes clear.

McCain was seen by the conservative base as far too impure ideologically, palling around with liberals on bellwether issues like immigration, global warming and campaign finance reform. He was also proving to be a disappointing campaigner: lacking a coherent message, committing gaffes and never really firing up any part of the electorate.

Sound familiar?

McCain chose Palin in a desperate attempt to buy credibility with the base of his own party. Same with Romney and Ryan. Romney, a man who apparently has no core, has attempted to hire one.

But what about Ryan’s intellectual gravitas, as compared with Palin’s anti-gravitas? Ryan’s famous plan, the Roadmap for America’s Future, may be radical and heartless, but as the GOP mantra goes, at least he has a plan.

Gravitas? People, Paul Ryan is a big fan of Ayn Rand. This counts as gravitas?

Only in Washington, as they say, though we shouldn’t overlook Star Trek conventions.

As any psychologist could tell you, if you’re obsessed with escaping someone, you are not free of that someone. In fleeing Sarah Palin, anxiously looking over his shoulder, Mitt Romney has run around in a circle, smack into Paul Ryan.

• “Top 10 Things All Leaders Must Know”
• “Leadership Advice from 5 Top Executives”
• “The 7 Deadly Sins of Leadership,” etc, etc.

I almost always find these lists worth reading. But at the same time, I find that in one sense, they all completely miss the point.

That’s because by the very act of making a list about leading, you are making sure that whoever reads that list will not be thinking like a leader. A list is a formula, an algorithm. And the urge to follow a formula is the very opposite of what makes a leader.

There is no algorithmic solution to leadership, no formula to follow. We wish there were. But if there were a formula for leadership, it wouldn’t be leadership. That’s because leadership is essentially about change: no change, no leadership. As Jack Welch of GE said, “Don’t manage, lead change — before you have to.” And if there were a formula for leading change, well, it wouldn’t be change, would it?

“Oh, things changed? Here, just follow this list, it’s what we always did, uh … before everything changed.”

Think about what leaders do, why we have them. Leaders lead. They walk at the front of the line, towards the unknown. Whatever is unknown might be dangerous. And that’s why we look around for a leader to put at the front of the line.

How do you get someone to take a job where the whole point is that they’re going to be the first one to take an arrow, or to discover there are crocodiles in the river? Unfortunately, this question leads us to the regrettably strong link between leadership and ego. Because one solution to the leader-hiring problem is to find the egomaniac in the tribe, give him a fancy title and tell him, frequently, how magnificent he is.

“Oh exalted one! All tremble before your might! We joyfully follow your lead into that dark cave that might have a bear in it! After you, your excellency!”

That’s still a popular way of choosing leaders, as the prevalence of egomaniacs in leadership positions shows. But it’s probably not the best way. If we’re going to give power to egomaniacs, we shouldn’t be surprised if they then turn out to be more interested in serving themselves than serving us.

We do need leaders who lead, who will walk at the front of the line towards the unknown.

It’s just that we need them to do it for the right reason: that is, not just for their own deluded sense of glory, but for the greater good of the tribe — part of what that means, of course, is that a true leader is actually a servant.

And that leads me to my mission here today: to deliver to you the World’s Shortest Leadership List. It’s the world’s shortest because it has only one item on it. That is the following:

If you want to be a leader, turn towards fear, for the greater good.

After working for a lot of leaders, good and bad, and taking leadership roles myself, I’m convinced that this is the one thing that makes the difference: You must be willing to turn towards fear, for the greater good. In other words, to take the risk of sacrificing yourself.

That’s the paradox of power: you gain power from the people you serve. You do that by showing that you’re willing to risk your own failure for their success.

There are certainly other things that are important for leaders to do. If I were to make a list with more than one item on it, it would include these:

1. Hire the person, not the qualifications. I’ve worked with people from Harvard and Stanford, and people with little formal education at all, and I’ve found that a resume doesn’t predict performance. What always ends up making someone great turns out to be their inherent desire to do good work. If they don’t know how to do the good work, they’ll learn. If you hire people like this, leading is a lot easier. I’ve realized that the most valuable talent I have is that I can recognize talent in other people.
2. Make the work the reward. If you have to use money to get people to do the work, you probably have a problem. The best people you’ll find are not motivated by money — in fact, studies show that creative people tend to be de-motivated by money. What they want is satisfying work, and recognition for doing it well. At my company, we provide media consulting for people who are making the world a better place. It’s really satisfying work, and we attract great people. I don’t have to worry about making them do a good job — that’s what they want to do. So once again, leading gets a lot easier. (And by the way, you don’t have to be in a traditionally “fun” industry to offer people good work. Read Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh, or Start Something That Matters, by Blake Mycoskie. Both books are by leaders of great places to work — and as it happens, both are about the business of selling shoes.)
3. Place power in the mission, not the person. If you can show — by your actions, not just your words — that decisions are made based on what best serves the mission, not just what best serves you, then people will follow you. If instead you show that it’s really just about you, then they won’t follow. Why should they?
4. Focus: don’t do a bunch of things you’re mediocre at, focus on one thing at which you can be great.
5. Communicate, all the time, more than you think you have to.
6. Have great processes, not just great ideas. We sometimes think leaders are all about inspiring visions, while mere managers plod away on the details. Inspiring visions don’t get very far if the processes are a mess. To succeed, you need both strategic excellence and operational excellence.

But there we go, making a long list.

Let’s get back to the one thing that matters. What separates leaders from everyone else is being able to turn towards fear, for the greater good.

This is what I have seen in every leader who has inspired me. I can tell you it sure inspired me in the best leader I’ve ever worked for. That was on a presidential campaign — and I hope you’d be able to hear this whether you voted for this particular candidate or not. Because I can tell you from first-hand experience that throughout the campaign, that candidate made it very clear to all of us that he would lose before he would sacrifice the values that had brought us all together. And he backed that up, by the actions he took even when no one outside the campaign would ever have seen if he had betrayed those values. In other words, he was ready to sacrifice his own good for what we all saw as the greater good.

If he had lost, in the final analysis, it would have been OK. When someone knows that, that’s how they’re able to turn towards fear. By doing so, they conquer fear on our behalf. That’s how they’re able to lead.

And that’s why we were following him.

Try this out, in your own life. Watch what happens the next time you’re in a group of people, facing fear. I can tell you what happens, nine times out of ten. I noticed it early in my management career. A group of us were sitting around griping about something we thought was going seriously wrong at our company. “Yeah!” we all said, “Yeah! We don’t have to stand for this! Damn right! Let’s go tell ‘em!”

And then an executive came along. So I stood up to tell him what we all thought. And as I started talking, I looked around at all my compadres — and noticed how all of a sudden I seemed to have a lot fewer compadres than I’d had just a moment before.

But you know what? It worked out just fine.

Good leaders want to hear the truth — hey, there’s another item for a list! As long as you’re not freaking out, you should be able to tell them what you really think — especially if your next step is to suggest a solution. And so it turned out that a confrontation with fear turned out to be an opportunity for me. An opportunity to learn how to lead.

Leaders turn towards risk, towards fear, and they do it for the greater good.

So as you pursue your opportunities to be a leader, that’s the advice I have, my World’s Shortest, One-Item Leadership List.

Watch for opportunities to be scared. When you find one, you may notice that your innards start making a strong case for running away, right now! That’s natural — after all, if you’re not scared, you can’t be brave. But, having noticed that you are scared, remind yourself that while fear is a signal of danger, fear is also a signal of opportunity.

Now, check to see if you’re doing the right thing, or if you’ve gotten yourself in trouble because you’re just a crazy egomaniac.

No? OK, now check to see if you really are in danger. Are you taking arrows? Swimming with crocodiles? Stuck in a cave with a bear? No?

Then take one step towards the fear.

Then take another, followed by another. In my experience, that’s how you learn to be a leader.

——————–
The above is based on the text of a speech I gave recently to the graduating class of Leadership Monterey Peninsula, a leadership training program based in Monterey, California.

sme_cc_chapman_v1 from Michael A. Stelzner on Vimeo.

This, I realized, has “viral” written all over it, so I thought I’d see what was happening on that front:

• The singers, Amanda Wikström, Petra Brohäll and Ebba Lovisa, recorded the video to share on Facebook with the other members of Erato.
• A stranger saw it and asked if he could post it on YouTube, which she did on October 20.
• Within a couple of days, about 100,000 other people had seen it.
• Robyn herself liked it. (These details via the English-language Swedish website The Local.)
• Checking YouTube today, October 30, I find 528,073 views.
• Looking at SocialMention, I see that as of October 20 the word “Erato” suddenly blows up, and its connotation of “Swedish singers” blows away all others, such as “classical record label”.
• Other celebrities are starting to notice, including Richard Marx, who tweeted about Erato two days ago, the same day Perez Hilton raved about them.

That story is pretty much the recipe for viral success, which boils down to this:

1. Do something great (these women can really sing – and keep time).
2. Make sure it’s different (they’re also the best cottage cheese tub players I’ve ever encountered).
3. Make it authentic: if it’s home-made and looks it, that’s good (nothing Hollywood about that lighting, or the set).
4. Do not promote it, share it (the Erato members told The Local they didn’t know how to post to YouTube, just Facebook).
5. Hope influencers like it.

The very simplicity of this recipe shows why viral success always looks so easy, but remains so rare. In a world of oceans of content, “great,” “different” and “authentic” become more and more precious.

Social Mention’s report on a search for “Erato” (including my enthusiastic tweet):

Maybe you don’t want to vote for the guy who looks like he should be president. Because the only reason he’s gotten as far as he’s gotten is because he looks like he should be president.

In studying rich and poor baseball teams for Moneyball, Lewis found that rich teams invested in the wrong players — in effect, the players who looked good, as opposed to the ones who actually were good.

It does sound like more than a few presidential candidates, not to mention much of the Senate.

A corollary: If there are two barbers in the shop, ask for the one with the bad haircut.

CodeNow focuses on developing the next pioneers in technology by teaching underserved youth foundational skills in computer science and programming with the objective of narrowing the current digital divide. The organization teaches high school students the basics of computer programming and computer science in free, extra-curricular, off-campus trainings and boot camps. Each student who completes their program receives a netbook, mentoring and assistance finding internships.

…and by CodeAcademy.org, offering free programming lessons on the web:

Coding is not just for the chosen few. Anyone can learn with the right environment, resources and dedication.

• Mon, 13 May 2013 21:14:52 +0000: Muslim Socialist Terrible at Destroying America - Spencer Critchley
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  In five seconds, you will be creating better-looking documents: Five, four, three, two -- Stop centering...
• Wed, 27 Feb 2013 17:57:12 +0000: As Sequester Looms, Signs of Defeat in the GOP War on Reality - Spencer Critchley
  After fighting the stimulus that spared our economy from disaster, the Party of No has threatened new ones in the form of the debt ceiling crisis, the second debt ceiling crisis, and now the sequester crisis.
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  So how is it possible that Mitt Romney can even be considered for the most important job in the world? How can Paul Ryan even be considered for the spot next in line?
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  Romney's release of only a summary of his taxes looks both disingenuous and incompetent -- just the qualities that make him so unelectable.