The Journey of Self-Mastery is a journey which holds meaning, reward and the eventual absence of fear.

I’m convinced the vast majority of Americans live in a miasma of fear. We don’t think we are good enough, smart enough, educated enough or rich enough to survive – not really. We all have lots of escapes – food, drugs, alcohol, ego, exercise, TV- to name the most common. And we have all sorts of survival modes from pinching pennies to getting three advanced degrees.

When we were three we weren’t able to survive. We were just adorable so someone would take care of us. But along the line of getting older we realized that being adorable wasn’t going to keep us surviving forever. So we began developing strategies. Some of us followed the lifelong strategy of looking young hence the plethora of creams, lotions and cosmetic surgical enhancements. Some of us had the drive to make millions of dollars. Some to buy arsenal of guns!

We are fragile humans living on a sometimes hostile earth. So what do we do? We embrace life instead of survival. We discover who we really are under all those survival strategies and fruitless escapes. It leads to a more fulfilling life and work.

Those years he spent getting to know himself, starting a family, working from home, learning to refine his ideas and leadership and management through NEXT and Pixar. The interesting thing about those years is despite many failures he continued to learn and change. That above all else may be the key to his success. In this day of wanting instant, quick results, the idea of spending 11 years learning seems impossible.

He opened himself to learning then he interviewed successful and admired CEO’s. He then adopted many of their behaviors and practiced their skills. However, he didn’t adopt all. He had values to which he adhered so for example he disregarded advice from Andy Grove of Intel fame.

Organizationally when something he tried didn’t work he changed it. For example, as his company got larger it tended to go in the direction of all bureaucracies and get hidebound. Since open communication is his mantra to correct this they developed “the Hacker Way” – getting engineers and programmers in a big room and working around the clock to change whatever was the issue or solve the problem.

I wonder how many of us could move from being a college student computer programmer to running a multi-billion dollar business in a few years. Would we be willing to be open to learning what we need to succeed at our goals?

There are the traditional leadership roles of officials being enacted as if in a separate universe from the people meeting, interacting, developing security networks for the neighborhoods and relating to each other in democratic ways. As a student of complexity theory and Senge’s learning organization I am utterly fascinated.

I’m struck by how seriously our political leaders take themselves as they pontificate and can’t see beyond their dogma to consider both the truly serious issues facing the world and the possible delight that can a be had in our humanity.

I, however, was mulling over how we can develop the ability to hold both simultaneously so that we can come from a place of both strength and wisdom. To tap into the mystic requires reflection – something in short supply in our world today. Warriors throughout history have practiced and been completely connected to the ground and their bodies. Will we take time in this busy emotionally trying world of today to do each?

Aside from learning about somatic leadership, I get to sit under a redwood tree and look out onto green hills with cows peacefully munching grass. A reminder to take time to reflect and enjoy nature.

In any case I was listening to Andrew Ross Sorkin the author of Too Big to Fail at a lecture in my local library Friday night. He was speaking about his personal observation of the key players in the financial debacle of 2008. He mentioned that at the lower levels of the banks there certainly were employees motivated by greed. They wanted their time in the sun of art collections and yachts. However, at the senior levels of the organizations it was not executive compensation that motivated the actions. Senior people already have money and art collections and yachts. Those actions were more about power and pride. Even in their phenomenal disclosures to him afterward, they wanted to have their ideas on record, have their side of the story told. Sorkin really didn’t think that there was any way to compel those players to “do the right thing” in the future. In other words there is no way to legislate morality.

He also said that one of the major problems is that the organizations are not too big to fail but that they are actually too big to manage. However, if the banks were broken up to smaller banks, they would not have the ability to finance the deals necessary for business today. He mentioned Morgan Stanley writing a 20 billion dollar check for the recent purchase of T-Mobile. In 2011 we have even bigger banks than existed in 2008. It is a conumdrum.

I am left with the question of how we prepare leaders of the future to manage organizations that are not only too big to fail but also too big to manage and perhaps manage egos that are too big to be fully responsible for their actions.

So what is the relationship between talent and leadership?  It is generally accepted that the best leaders are the ones who are in touch with the aspirations of their followers. If so what kind of talent does that take? It often takes technical talent to rise in an organization but then at senior levels it takes talent in communication and awareness of self and others to bring others along. When boards are looking at compensation for executives, they look at results and profits, decision making ability and lastly but intrinsically the ability to move the organization toward stated goals. Since this latter part underpins the other more concrete measures it needs to be seen as the primary talent of a leader.

What is fair compensation for a talented leader?  The renowned leadership thinker Eliot Jacques believes fair is the right word – as we all have an inherent sense of rightness or fairness when it comes to compensation. The economists are beginning to say that we have reached a place that is deemed no longer fair. Will capital reassert itself again? Can we even come to fairly compensate leaders for their leadership ability?

Years ago when I was doing management and leadership development in organizations, I became aware that what we as a field were doing wasn’t working. In fact, Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) did research on what actually developed leaders and they found that it was certain kinds of experience that developed senior managers. Experiences where we had hardship, assignments that provided leaps in scope were two of the experiences, for example.

My quest took me to graduate school for research and a PhD on what did work. After my degree I spent time researching the newest ideas in teaching/learning. So today I guess I’ve settled on the practical.

Developing disciplined practices that keep a leader centered and grounded be it meditation or martial arts like Aikido or any endeavor that preserves the mind/ body connection is one key. Another is being clear about one’s purpose and vision and another is being aware of internal and external languages to be able to challenge deeply held assumptions in ourselves and others. These are exercises in practical leadership. Ones we rarely make the time to explore. Skills that underlie the experiences found in the CCL research on developing leaders.