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Read Investor's Business Daily review of The 100 Mile Walk |
Copyright 2006 Investors Business Daily
Don’t Be Afraid to Innovate
Playing Up The Difference
Father and son Sander and Jonathon often differ in their perceptions.
Sander Flaum, the founder of New York-based Flaum Partners, is a professor of management at the Fordham Graduate School of Business. His degree? MBA. His favorite read? “Straight from the Guy,” by Jack Welch. His hero? Winston Churchill.
Then there’s Jonathon Flaum, chief executive of WriteMind Communications. His degree’s in philosophy. He prefers Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” to business books. His hero’s the Zen thinker Shunryu Suzuki.
When the two decided to collaborate on a book about leadership, they had one overriding question to tackle: How would they handle their polarity?
Instead of blending their beliefs on how to become successful, the two decided to highlight their differences in “The 100 Mile Walk: A Father and Son on a Quest to Find the Essence of Leadership.”
For the book, the Flaums agreed to walk a combinded total of 100 miles together in different places, from pre-Hurrican Katrina New Orleans to New York City. During each outing, they teased out the nuances of different aspects of leadership. How’d the Flaums differ? Here’s a breakdown of a few of their opposite takes:
On Work/Live Balance:
Sander Flaum: “Young people in India and China are not talking about work/life balance or worrying about how to spend more time at home with the kids or to plant a garden…The insistence on work/life balance among young American workers is threatening to catapult American business into a full-blown leadership crisis.”
Jonathon Flaum: “Work without adequate time for intimate connection and personal time has long-term degenerative effects.”
On Vigilance In Busines:
Sander Flaum: “I think you should be attuned to the knowledge that, at any time, every competitor of yours is out to recruit your best people, steal your ideas, take over your customers and reinvent and improve your products.”
Jonathon Flaum: “Paranoia works…sometimes. But it robs us of fully enjoying those times when everything is just fine.”
On Persistence:
Sander Flaum: “Persistence is the ability to see difficulty simply as territory through which you have to navigate.”
Jonathon Flaum: “It is being able to accept that you need a walkway when your original intention was a staircase. In the end, you still have something that takes you somewhere, and you have the added realization that you had to bend and flex and acknowledge external circumstances to get you there.”
Though picking through such different viewpoints isn’t necessarily easy, the end result is often a deeper – and more realistic – understanding of important topics. By the time they finished their book, the Flaums knew for sure that two viewpoints are better than one.
“After what seemed like an eternity of trying to convince the other of our rightness, we learned to listen to each other,” Jonathon Flaum said.
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