This is the final guest blog post from our finalists in this year’s Best of Leadership Blogs competition (make your pick for best blog here)
John Baldoni is an exceptional leader in the fields of leadership and communications
. Inaddition to being a leadership consultant, he is a coach, motivational speaker, and author. John has written six books that deal with leadership and how leaders use proven methods to create results. John was recognized in 2007 as one of the world’s top 30 leadership gurus by Leadership Gurus International.
I share a post of his here because his blog is a finalist in the 2009 Best of Leadership Blogs contest.
Sum Up Your Leadership in Six Words
By John Baldoni (July 9, 2009)
Once upon a time Ernest Hemingway was challenged to write a story using only six words. Impossible, some thought. Not for Papa, as Neal Conan explained on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. The next day Hemingway produced this: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”
Clare Booth Luce, according to columnist Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, once told President John Kennedy that “a great man is one sentence.” Noonan writes that Lincoln’s life could be summed up as “He preserved the Union and freed the slaves.” My colleague, Scott Eblin, adapted the concept to summing up one’s leadership legacy. “It takes time and effort to boil down the essence of what you’re trying to do to a short and memorable idea.”
Reducing one’s life to a handful of words is a mighty challenge. Creating a six-word memoir, a concept inspired by a project conducted by Smith College’s magazine, can be a useful exercise in self-analysis, particularly if you apply the process to reflecting upon your goals and your results. Did we achieve what we set out to achieve? Did I help them and the team to succeed? Did our results stand the test of time?
I strongly urge you to think about and do this exercise for yourself.
This is just the start of this post, you can read the rest here, or find it through HarvardBusiness.org, along with a variety of other blogs.
John’s post is thoughtful, as they all are, and suggests one of the most useful leadership activities you could try – or share with others in your ongoing leadership development processes.
Vote for John or any of the other finalists here
. Inaddition to being a leadership consultant, he is a coach, motivational speaker, and author. John has written six books that deal with leadership and how leaders use proven methods to create results. John was recognized in 2007 as one of the world’s top 30 leadership gurus by Leadership Gurus International.
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