What Would President Kennedy Say About Creative Leadership?

Robert Taraschi of Milestone Ideas on creative leadership. Bob is a former theatre director at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre Company in the UK, who like myself found a new world and a new passion in applying theatrical methodologies to the development of people's creative leadership and creativity skills. Bob's writing, driven by his creative experience in theatre, comes straight from the heart rather than the rationally constrained mind of the academic and because of that I find his writing honest and accessible and his search for meaning in the field of creative leadership quite profound. I offer his recent piece on reflections on President Kennedy's leadership as an introduction.

In Boston, the USS John Kennedy, the aircraft carrier, named for the late President, bids us farewell. The carrier was frequently stationed in the Mediterranean, projecting power and authority in a tumultuous Middle East.

I feel closer to Kennedy than any other president who served in the White House, As a young boy, I stood about three feet from him during his 60's Presidential bid. On its way through Philadelphia to a political rally, his motorcade lumbered by my grade school and I was able to get a glimpse of the man who would be our president. As much as that was a thrill for me, I imagine it must be quite an honor to have a ship or a building named after you, a way to live in perpetuity or until the building is wrecked or the ship is decommissioned. These days, perpetuity doesn't last as long as it used to.  As I wandered, which is what writers do, along the Boston waterfront on a cold, spring afternoon, I saw the USS John Kennedy for the first and last time. I'd have liked to stop that ship and chat with it, but it had its work to do and I had mine.

If Kennedy had lived, he would now be an elder statesman. I wondered, as I wandered, what advice he would give our leaders and their inevitable showdown with power and fate. Kennedy believed might and diplomacy are not mutually exclusive alternatives. He believed that the use of force was the last resort, but he also knew that the threatened potential use of force was an essential instrument in diplomacy and an equally important prevention of its ultimate use. He believed that force was the 600 pound gorilla in the room, the heavy hand inside the glove. His focus therefore was on imaginative diplomacy, suggestive diplomacy where the presence of overwhelming force can demonstrate vivid determination without actually showing its shock and awe.

Kennedy also believed you never negotiate out of fear, but you also never fear to negotiate.” For him, this was more than a clever turn of phrase. It was a principal that valued dialogue and conflict as a means to an end and not the imposition of one will over another. And finally, I think it was Kennedy's axiom thatperfection is the enemy of good.If it wasn't, it should have been. It is another way of saying, that change occurs with small, first-steps into conflict, rather than one or two giant steps around it, or over it.

As I imagined Kennedy, I also imagined his advice to American business. He may ask us why we are desperately trying and failing to keep up with our technological brilliance.

I imagine Kennedy would point to the last century as a guide. In that time, we have learned to do with two hours less sleep, while millions of children, especially males are being diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. In a 24/7 economy, where we’re living with communications so close that we're comfortable with blinking blue-lit telephones hanging from our ears, Blackberries, beepers, IPods dangling from our belts, he would observe we are enchanted by the beating, vibrating and buzzing of our own importance.

I imagine Kennedy would point out how we see ourselves less as humans and more as efficient machines. Our evolutionary design, he would point out, is not modeled on a machine: we break down with stress-related diseases, depression, heart disease, stokes, cancer, diabetes and chronic bad backs. He might also know that and that in the face of that knowledge we prefer to become trigger-happy in the face of frustration and human-ness, experiencing desk rage, road rage and air rage.

I imagine Kennedy would find parallel between faith and management theory and practice. He might find some interesting points of comparisons, for example, the perfection all members of an organization seek. He might look at some business leaders and their charismatic authority and suggest how the faith of the modern manager is a forward-looking optimism, which, he might point out, is a defense against the anxiety provoked by the experience of chaos and a world that is less than perfect, and their inability to think about it and live with it.

I imagine he would have something to say about the foundational beliefs that support our notions of productivity and efficiency. He might suggest that both can be used as a defense against the disappointment of omnipotent phantasies. Paradoxically, he might point out, there is no more persuasive argument for change than the need for productivity, and no where is this need more evident than in the ranks of unemployed and the poor, and that it is not the poor and underserved who keep reins on the status quo, but the powerful. I imagine he would offer the poor and unemployed to always seek change.

He might say all of this, or then, he might just pass quietly into history.