"It's the Singer, not the Song"

I watched "The Aristocrats" recently. For those of you haven't seen it yet, I won't spoil it for you; I think it's worth a rental. In a nutshell, the directors take a number of different comics and portray all of them telling their own version of the same joke; several of them even elaborate on it and relate their perspectives on the joke, it's place in comedy, etc. It's kind of like a documentary...but funny! I enjoyed the movie, but two things stuck with me:

1) Kevin Pollack's impression of Christopher Walken. First off, I like Christopher Walken. He seems to live in between multiple worlds! I like that guy. He is effective in multiple genres (drama, comedy, music videos, etc.), and while he doesn't seem to take himself seriously he does seem to take what he does seriously (to paraphrase my comedic philosopher / college roommate of many years ago). Plus, he's got his own style with which he does things. Which leads me to...

2) ...the title of this blog. One of the comics mentioned it when they were relating their perspective on the joke. And my mind (as it often does) riffed off of that and onto another tangent -

Leadership. An important word that often comes across as trite, and frequently trivialized with glib lip service. What is leadership? How do you identify it? How do you measure it? I've been thinking about this off and on for about a week. I had a conversation with a professional colleague, and we got around to the subject of leadership. In my opinion, if you don't have it or can't exhibit it with how you live, let alone how you do your job, it will come across as an ephemeral, taunting muse...you can see it, but it's just out of reach. You can see that you don't have it.

I think I've still got a lot to learn (which I think is part of the reason why I'm still around), but I am fortunate that I have had many leadership experiences from an early age. I think my first real leadership role was in the Boy Scouts, when I was about 12 and I had to get a bunch of older, teen ager boys to not just listen to me and do what I asked, but also to support me. Now that's a scary challenge for a young lad...

So, what is leadership, and how do you judge a leader? Most of the definitions I've read are tautological, and don't shed any new light on the subject (see Wikipedia or Merriam Webster's Dictionary for more data). My Dad used to quote Shakespeare's Henry V and the speech King Henry gave to his troops before the Battle of Agincourt (known as the St. Crispin's Day speech).

I'll give you my definition (and how I identify it), and then tell you how I measure it. I'm going to skip the obvious characterizations of title, office, majority party, etc., and focus on the more personal characteristics of Leadership. As with good Modern Art, "I know it when I see it".

There are two aspects to it - the internal and the external. The external can be seen through an individual's behaviors and measured by the results he produces. The internal is tougher to see or evaluate.

The external is what everyone sees; the internal is what everyone wants to know.

I've always like books of quotations, and I think Voltaire summed it up best when he referred to it as “...the fruits of labor, the price of courage.” You measure it by one's results (“...the fruits of labor...”); you identify it by the “...price of courage.” (how one makes decisions, especially difficult ones; how they use what they stand for in life to guide their actions).

Essentially, when it comes time to make a tough decision, how will one decide? Unlike the stock market, I think a person's past performance in this realm IS a good predictor of future performance. Leadership comes from one's character, and that doesn't really change too much after about age 7.

This is what I thought of when I heard the quote I used for this blog's title. It was mentioned in reference to the telling of a particular joke. I heard it in reference to how one leads in life (business, family, self, etc.).