Erwin Michael S. - Lead Yourself First: Inspiring Leadership Through Solitude

To reflective leaders, present and future

We live, in fact, in an age starved for solitude.

C. S. LEWIS

This book is based on the experiences of leaderssome contemporary, some historicalwho have used solitude to function more effectively as leaders. Our research has been qualitative: rather than gather large masses of data (say, from survey results) and then look for patterns within that data, we have gathered the stories of individual leaders and looked for patterns within those. Qualitative research takes longer than quantitative research; in our case, about five years. But our research has revealed patterns nonetheless. Some of those patterns concern the different purposes for which leaders use solitude: broadly stated, to find clarity, creativity, emotional balance, and moral courage. Other patterns concern the different ways in which leaders find solitude, and the obstacles they face in finding it.

Our research began, in a sense, with our own experiences. Although Mike is a strong extrovert and Ray a strong introvert, both of us have sought out solitude throughout our adult lives. As a first lieutenant in Iraq during 2004, Mike chose to walk rather than ride each day to the chow hall, a mile each way, twice a day, in temperatures approaching 100 degrees. In those days Mike had a dozen soldiers reporting to him, on a base repeatedly attacked by mortar and rocket fire. Sometimes, on those walks, Mike gathered his thoughts about some problem then facing him. Other times, he steadied himself emotionally. Years later, during the solitude of long runs, Mike developed the idea for a new nonprofit to support veterans returning home from deployments overseas. Now known as Team Red, White & Blue, the nonprofit benefits more than a hundred thousand veterans. Ray found solitude, as a law student, during solo camping trips in the forests of northern Michigan, fishing in the streams there. As a law clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy, Ray walked alone around the Capitol and the Supreme Court building when thinking through a case. Now, as a federal judge, Ray heads up to his barn office looking out on northern Lake Huron, without any Internet connection, when writing opinions in difficult cases.

With the exception of one story about Mike, however, this book is based on the stories of other leaders. We define leadership broadly, to include running a large corporation with thousands of employees, or leading a handful of employees on a single team, or leading a single family member through crisis or growth. Anyone who leads anyoneincluding oneselfcan benefit from solitude. About half the book is based on interview material from contemporary leaderssome of them famous, but more of them people like the readers of this book. Other chapters illustrate the experiences of prominent leaders throughout historyEisenhower in the days before D-day, Aung San Suu Kyi during her years of house arrest in Burma, Martin Luther King Jr. during the Montgomery bus boycott, to name a few. Each of those chapters tells a discrete story about how the leader used solitude to be more effective. In some of these stories, the leader used solitude as a regular practice, as Eisenhower did when he wrote memoranda to himself during World War II. Other stories show how a leader used solitude in a particular instance, as Martin Luther King did at his kitchen table one night in January 1956. But all of these stories are stories, rather than snapshots. And thus each of them involves a discussion not only of solitude itself, but also of the broader circumstancesthe time, the setting, the difficultiesin which the leader found himself or herself. Taken as a whole, however, each of those chapters provides an illustration of the timeless importance of solitude to effective leadership.

The book is divided into four parts, each of them focusing upon a particular qualityclarity, creativity, emotional balance, and moral couragethat solitude enhances. Our discussion of interview material tracks those boundaries, and for the most part the historical chapters do as well. But sometimes a historical story that primarily illustrates one quality also touches upon another. Eisenhowers story is about clarity, for example, but to a lesser extent shows how he used solitude to maintain his emotional balance. We keep those stories intact rather than separate the different parts of the story into different parts of the book.

What our contemporary and historical research has shown above all, however, is that personal leadershipleading oneselfis the foundation of leading others. And personal leadership comes through solitude.

Leading from good to great requires disciplinedisciplined people who engage in disciplined thought and who take disciplined action. To engage in disciplined action first requires disciplined thought, and disciplined thought requires people who have the discipline to create quiet time for reflection. The net result is not doing more, but doing less. Stop-doing lists reflect greater discipline than ever-expanding to-do lists of frenetic activity. This book is all about creating those pockets and putting them to good use.

When Darwin Smith served as chief executive of Kimberly-Clark, he made many of his biggest strategic decisions in tractor time. He would visit his farm in Wisconsin, rumbling around on a tractor backhoe, picking up gigantic rocks from a pile, and moving them across the property to another pile. At one crucial point, he faced a conundrum: what to do about the struggling paper-mills business that had anchored the company for a hundred years. Smith mulled around for a long time, moving rocks from pile to pile, then back again. And he gained clarity: If you have a cancer in your arm, you have to have the guts to cut off your own arm, reflected Smith, who had once battled throat cancer. He made a clear decision: Sell the millsjettison a hundred years of legacyand put all the resources into the companys emerging consumer business, going all-in with a big bet on consumer-facing brands like Kleenex. A board member called it one of the gutsiest decisions hed ever seen a CEO make, a turning point that ignited a good-to-great transformation and earned Smith a spot as one of the greatest business leaders of the twentieth century.

Winston Churchill loved to lay bricks at Chartwell, his home retreat, especially when cast into his wilderness years of the 1930s. Bill Gates, during the rise of Microsoft, set aside entire weeks to just go away and read and reflect, what he called think week. Warren Buffett gravitated toward the quietude of his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, and crafted a simple daily life full of reading and gestation; one of Buffetts fondest phrases: Inactivity can be very intelligent behavior. George Washington would lose himself for hours riding his favorite horse around Mount Vernon. Ron Chernows fabulous biography of Washington tells of how he thrived on a daily routine of unvarying regularity, making particular use of time alone for work and reflection early in the morning before others awoke. Chernow also questions the famous image of Washington on his knees in prayerful meditation at Valley Forge, seeking guidance and strength, oblivious to people around himnot because he doubted the act but because Washington would have almost certainly done so alone, in private.

Of course, you need not be in such rarified company to make use of quiet solitude. While working on this foreword, I am completing a study of exceptional people who lead K12 schools to high results in the most difficult and adverse circumstances, from dangerous urban neighborhoods to poor rural townships. These K12 school leaders continually renew themselves for redeployment day by day and year by year; many do so by creating alone-time to reflect and recharge. One elementary principal in a school whose students come from an adjacent, crime-ridden neighborhood crafted a personal bubble every morning, just sitting in her car, before heading into the building. She deliberately arrived a few minutes early whenever possible, to give herself these moments.