If leadership were easy, we wouldn't have to look at Jack Welch's grinning mug every time we pass Barnes & Noble. There are two choices: Magically become a leader overnight, or hone your skills over time by "learning" to make smart choices with quick reads like The Great Man and The CEO. Both books will pass the time faster than any treatise on Six Sigma.
The Books: The Log From the Sea of Cortez (1941) and The Motorcycle Diaries (1995)
These nonfiction personal journals by two of the 20th century's greatest minds, John Steinbeck and Ernesto "Che" Guevara, are factual accounts furnished with colorful, candid observations, their implicit message being an imperative to discover the world beyond our field of view. The first rule of a journey: Don't go alone. The second: The American diet of work, stress, and deadlines could use a serious adjustment.
Steinbeck was the first to get wise. Enlisting his best friend and a small crew, he pushes off from the dock in San Diego in a 70-foot yacht bound for the Gulf of California. Sailing away from the crowds and commerce, he watches from the deck "as though they moved, not we," signaling that the journey ahead offers a refreshing shift in perspective. Steinbeck and his crew's social values, their priorities, and even their sense of time are soon thrown into stark contrast by the native Americans they encounter in Baja California. Here they find a people "too ignorant to understand the absurdities merchandising can really achieve when it has an enlightened people to work on."
Attempting to buy a man's harpoon, Steinbeck discovers that the natives have no concept of time as a "salable article." The harpoon may cost three pesos, he says, but the man is unable to put a precise cost on the three days he must travel in his canoe to buy another.
Like Steinbeck, Guevara and his closest friend set out on a similar journey of exploration, but across South America on a motorcycle. In the impoverished towns and villages, they encounter a slower pace of life, and a people "halfway between two worlds." Outside of Caracas, Venezuela, Guevara encounters peasants living in boxcars while modern aircraft soar overhead. Out of sync with the modern culture around them, the South American natives nevertheless have much to share. Guevara writes of how he's changed from what he's seen. "The person who reorganizes and polishes [these notes], me, is no longer, at least I'm not the person I once was."
Like the unscripted journeys they catalog, Steinbeck and Guevara are at the whim of time, place, and chance. The experiences they bring back remind us that real life takes shape outside the confines of quarterly reports and mission statements.
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