The Peripatetic Philosopher shares a conversation on Intuitive Leadership:

Intuitive leadership & the Tsunami Soul

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 30, 2019

George claims, rightly so, that I've said this all before. I answer:

Thanks for your response to my request as to how you like my title, "INTUITIVE LEADERSHIP." 

It is true I read a lot. And I'm now into 700 pages of Jacques Barzun's massive "Dawn to Decadence" (2000). It covers 1500 to 2000 in Western history and was published when Barzun was 93. 

I had read his "The House of Intellect"(1959) when I was young and it made quite an impression on me. In fact, if you have read it, you might understand why it woke me up and found me retreating from everything I was taught to cherish: ideas, authority, education and my culture (Catholicism). 

Then South Africa was experienced, corroborating my malaise, which found me retreating from life (and work), resigning from Nalco, and from the self I was programmed to be, doing nothing for two years but reading books, playing tennis and basketball with my boys and their friends after school, consulting a bit, then going back to school for six years (full time), year around to earn a Ph.D. 

Graduate academics were everything Barzun had said they were and were not. So, the last shreds of my idealism were essentially left behind in meaningless scholastic pedantry. 

Life before and since has been my best teacher.

Yes, I’ve said all this before in my books, but what I have not said is why I have had the extraordinary life that I have had, landing on my feet no matter what I have done. It was all there – between the lines and words – but not necessarily apparent. It was – what I might call – my nascent “Intuitive Leadership” – since I was a child. 

What I would like to do now is go from episode to episode to point out what transpired and why and what was learned. 

How many people give up (a high six figure income in 2019 dollars) with a wife and four children ages 5 to 8 to support, then to do nothing for two years, only to go back to school when nearly broke to rise again to corporate executive status in another company (Honeywell Europe) and for the first time find love in marriage against all odds? 

Three things I’ve always had going for me: (1) I am a listener not only to others but to myself; (2) with rare exception, I accept myself as I am, therefore am not easily fooled by others; and (3) have no trouble admitting I feel before I think. Feeling a situation (and people in it), when not ignored has proven close to infallible for me. 

That said, I’ve not always listened to myself, but almost always when in dire circumstances, not cognitively, as it exists only in my subtext, but intuitively. 

But when I do listen, this finds me often experiencing not what is expected but something considered counterintuitive. 

Will “Intuitive Leadership” resonate with others? I don’t know.

In any case, Barzun shows grandly how there is nothing new. Every triumph, scandal, colossal embarrassment or defeat has likely happened many times in the past 500 years. Indeed, there have been comforting “dawns” and discomforting “decadences” throughout Western history. 

In the end, there is little evidence we are anything but simple souls despite our many engineering feats and inventions to prove the contrary.

My whole writing life has been addressed to sharing what I have learned. I am not the most gifted of men, but I’ve paid attention. That has been the focus of my missives – to alert a society in a state of relative somnolence that there are acres of diamonds under their feet waiting to be picked up. 

The war everyone thinks they are facing is not “out there.” It resides inside waiting to be addressed. To read the books today, surf the net, you detect a preference for social media to personal identity, for national political intrigue to family concerns. 

Orchestrated escape as entertainment has been the order of the day dominated by those who man the power grid while a tsunami is churning inside society calmed by the narcotics of political chicanery, social gratuitous violence and media scandal. 

Be always well,

Jim

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