Real Leadership: Harness the Wisdom of the Ancient World and Flourish in the Now of the Modern World

This assessment focuses on leadership. This may be leveraged by individuals, team members, team and enterprise leaders, and ecosystem leaders.

The world is experiencing a leadership crisis driven by a pollyannish perspective --- when we should instead embrace a more realistic perspective that integrates every aspect of human nature and reality, including “the good, the bad, and the ugly.”

More Natural, More Human, More Real

Leadership must evolve beyond the pollyannish --- which romanticizes leadership, infantilizes people in leadership roles, sterilizes our endeavors, grounds us in platitudes, and ultimately disconnects us from the authentic nature of reality --- toward something more natural, more human, more real.

This means leading naturally --- orchestrating through coherence, congruence, and calibration, not dominating through the imposition of will --- to advance intentions, catalyze progress, create impact, and achieve success.

The Wisdom of the Ancient World in the Now of the Modern World

How do we achieve success?

• Reality consists of a dynamic collection of interacting entities (sponsors, leaders, units of individuals, and individuals) within a specific environment wherein tensions naturally unfold between the entities.

• Achieving success involves advancing intentions among the entities and creating impact in the environment by catalyzing progress using the tensions.

• Leadership focuses on achieving success while followership focuses on catalyzing progress. Both are entangled in working with the tensions and the entities to advance intentions and create impact.

• The Art of War (or the Sun Tzu), written approximately 2,500 years ago, offers a timeless and comprehensive, flexible framework for wayfinding (finding one's way) through chaos, with uncertainty as the fundamental challenge, and achieving success.

The Five Fundamentals

• Tao (Reality): “Embrace Reality” (Chapter 1). Achieving success is rooted in embracing reality.

• Heaven (Dynamics): “Leverage Energy in Competing to achieve Success” (Chapters 5, 7, and 3). Dynamics involve the interplay of tensions that manifest as coherence/incoherence, congruence/incongruence, or neutral coexistence which are calibrated/uncalibrated.

• Earth (Context): “Leverage Configuration in an Engagement to address Challenges” (Chapters 4, 2, and 6). Context involves the conditions wherein the interplay of tensions unfolds.

• The General (Leadership): “Leverage Awareness for Advancing in Context” (Chapters 13, 9, and 11). Leadership involves intuiting and improvising to advance one's intentions to achieve impact.

• Method (Approach): “Leverage Transforming for Proactiveness in Context” (Chapters 8, 12, and 10). Approach involves employing the means to achieve the ends through advancing one's intentions and creating impact.