Integral Leadership Book Makes Earthpage Blog!

Our new integral leadership book, The Way of Leading People: Unlocking Your Integral Leadership Skills with the Tao Te Ching -- a modern interpretation of the Tao Te Ching -- by Patrick Warneka and Timothy Warneka has been selected to be featured on Earthpage's blog.

You can read the blog here.

Are You Giving Your Customers What They Need?

Amazon, that seller of everything on-line, recently did an amazing thing:

They gave their customers what they needed.

If you're like me, you use Amazon reviews quite extensively. Amazon reviews allows me to make a more informed purchasing decision because I can read feedback from people who are actually USING the products (Reading through the reviews, it's amazing how many things seem to NOT work with Microsoft's Vista OS.)

Always on the cutting edge, Amazon recently rolled out capabilities for video reviews. Problem was, hardly anyone was using them. So Amazon came up with a brilliant strategy:

they gave away free video cameras.

That's right. Amazon gave away $179.00 Flip Video Cameras. And they were smart about it ... they gave them away to people who consistently post reviews.

In other words, Amazon had set up a sales channel that wasn't working. Rather than abandon it, they chose instead to support it by giving people (customers, in this case) the materials they needed to get the job done. (I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall listening in on the negotiations between Amazon and Pure Digital, the makers of the Flip Video Camera!)

I got mine. Best of all, the give-away happened at a synchronistic time for me. Recently, I've been reviewing options to move into providing videos for my customers. The Flip Camera gives me an easy way to begin explore the digital video arena.

For years, I've been a big fan of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. I was a fan even when the naysayers in the late '90's said that Amazon would never amount to much. This camera give-away continues to support my belief in Amazon, and not just because I got a free camera. Rather, it is strategic moves like these that shows how Amazon is continuing to provide their customers a better way. Strategies like that will always win in the marketplace.

Go, Jeff!


BOTTOM LINE: Superior leaders make sure they give their customers what they need. It's called great customer service.

The importance of "emotional baggage" for leaders

A leader recently emailed me about the importance of leaders dealing with "emotional baggage" - emotional leftovers that can arise as anger, frustration, etc. years after an event. This leader wanted to know how emotional baggage from the past might hurt him in his leadership role today.

His question got me thinking.

Whenever leaders ask me this question, I use the metaphor of physical wounds. If I'm cooking in the kitchen, and I cut myself with a knife, I may have to get several stitches. If the wound heals properly, two years down the road there will be a scar. If the cut is still festering and oozing disgusting fluids two years later, I am going to get the cut treated, because left untreated, that festering wound can make me very physically sick.

This analogy holds for leaders' psychology. If I go through an event that leaves emotional scars, what is called "emotional baggage" is what happens when our emotional wounds are festing and oozing emotional pus. The feelings of anger, frustration (or whatever feeling you experience in relation to this past events) ARE the emotional pus.

The best response when this "emotional pus" occurs is to manage the emotional wound with a coach. Working with a coach can help drastically descrease (or even remove) this emotional baggage.

So what happens when leaders ignore when their emotional wounds are oozing? They infect others around them, decreasing emotional engagement and employee performance.

Bottom Line: Effective leaders take care of emotional baggage from the past because they know doing so will make them even better leaders.

Leading the Next Generation of Employees

Some Kansas State University professors and students are creating an interesting buzz in discussing the state of students today. You can watch the video on YouTube. The KSU blog is here.

A fascinating discussion of a vision of students today ... critical information for any leader will be hiring in the foreseeable future.

Best Leadership Practices .... Part 2

In part 1 of this blog, I talked about keeping it simple. In part 2, we'll talk about another mission-critical task for leaders:

changing your consciousness.

Just as children learn to crawl, then walk, then run, so too do adults have developmental tasks they must achieve. These days, many psychological researchers including Robert Kegan and Ken Wilber are pointing out that the largest developmental task is broadening your consciousness.

Clam bake, anyone?

In a recent report in Nature magazine, scientist have discovered physical evidence that early humans held the technology to have a clambake ... over 164,000 years ago, which is far earlier than scientists had thought.

While is appears to be child's play today, the ability to have a clambake required a certain level of consciousness development. According to the article, it actually took thousands of years for that clambake technology to become widespread.

Unfortunately, we don't have 1,000's of years for new levels of consciousness to emerge. The well-established threat of global warming, and our continued use of violence to solve problems has put us on a race with the clock. There's no guarantee that humanity will survive.

Emerging levels of consciousness, referred to as post-rational (which I wrote about in my book The Way of Leading People: Unlocking Your Integral Leadership Skills with the Tao Te Ching) are what will get us out of this mess.
To be effective, leaders need to be on the forefront of consciousness development.

We'll talk more about consciousness development in the near future.


BOTTOM LINE: Best leadership practices for the 21st century include leaders developing their consciousness

New Leadership Prints!

The Black Belt Consulting Group has teamed up with ImageKind to provide you with cutting-edge leadership prints. If you are interested in prints containing themes about Aikido, Integral Leadership, Emotional Intelligence, Conscious Leadership and other important leadership themes, be sure to visit:

http://timwarneka.imagekind.com/

Best Leadership Practices: Keep It Simple

Best leaders keep it simple. In this terrific article by from The Chronicle of Higher Education, University of Virginia professor John D. Arras offers several simple and insightful leadership practices.

While professor Arras is writing about leadership in the classroom, his words can easily be applied to leadership in any organization. His thoughts on "teach thinking" (every position ... even in the same field ... needs people who can think); "Keep it Real" (every leader's goal); and "Paying it Backward and Forward" (You have great leaders in your life who taught you the ropes, didn't you?) should be required reading for every leader.

Bottom Line: Great leaders keep it simple.