Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership

Synchronicity is one of the most inspiring books I know on leadership. The book is a fascinating and holistic blend of the personal and the professional. Jaworski is a name you may already be familiar with. He is the son of Watergate prosecutor, Leon Jaworski. His career is facinating. He began his professional life as a high-powered attorney in Houston. He chased after and won all of the trappings of external success. Then, suddently, his wife announced she was leaving him, and he was forced to confront himself, his values, and the meaning and purpose of his life. The rest seems to flow out of this pivotal experience. Jaworski left the practice of law and went on to become founder, chairman, and CEO of the American Leadership Forum. This organization continues to serve established local leaders and promotes collaborative problem-solving in communities and regions for the public good. In the early 90's, he joined Royal Dutch Shell in London as head of Global Scenario Planning. The initiative he led there is credited as instrumental in the peaceful transfer of power in South Africa which put an end to the government of apartheid. At the time the book was published, Jaworski was with MIT's Center for Organizational Learning which later closed in 1997. His role there was to work with leading corporations on building learning organizations, a topic which still receives considerable focus in leadership circles. It's a concept that appeals to many, and yet few have succeeded in implementing one. The old models die hard. Still, change is in the air. The book speaks to topics that resonate with us at a deep level: integrity, commitment, responsibility, values, meaning, vulnerability, trust, collaboration, to name a few. The book begins with a familiar story. A man seeking what we've been led to believe is success. Prestige as a high-powered attorney, a big income and a big home. Then his world falls apart when his wife leaves him, and his identity proceeds to fall apart. He rebuilds a life that is based on authenticity. He speaks of finding the flow in his life when he honors an inner call. He has a vision of what is possible. He sees his life and his choices as intimately connected with the world. He sees himself and his actions in relationship, not isolated and separate. He notes the the busyness of his earlier life as symptomatic of a larger of dis-ease in our culture. We spend too much of our time on activity and too little time on being present to what's really happening around us. We've forgotten the power we have as a witness. We fear having too much time to reflect, instinctively knowing that we're going to have to face ourselves and our lives at a deeper level than we're comfortable with. We're hooked on the notion that commitment and activity are inseparable. So we create a continual stream of activity, making sure that everybody sees us doing lots of things so they'll believe we're actually committed. If we stay busy enough, maybe we'll

My colleagues and I have been designing and facilitating leadership development programs for about 20 years. I've also served as a VP of three Fortune 500 companies. I recommend this book to everyone who is a leader or who wants to be one. Not only does it contain THE secret to true leadership, Mr. Jaworski has written his account so that it reads like a good mystery novel. You wonder what will happen next. And he has written this book from his heart. I hope our paths cross one day soon.

Many books about leadership view the subject as being akin to mechanical engineering. How do you get all those people (like cogs in a machine) to act in just the ways you want them to? Mostly written by leaders to describe their own experiences or by writers to explain what leaders told them, these books are unsatisfying in the extreme. Take a look at Flawed Advice and the Management Trap by Chris Argyris to get a further perspective on this problem. This book is totally different, and quite appealing.Jaworski (son of Leon Jaworski, the famous special prosecutor of the Watergate scandal) tells of his personal journey from being a successful corporate lawyer to becoming someone who works on making leadership better for all of us. Like most personal journeys, this one has low points (his wife falling in love with another man and telling Jaworski to move out that day, his father not telling him that he loved him, and the deaths of a child of each of his two sisters) and some high points (breakthrough meetings with great thinkers and stimulating helpful change). You could read the book for this, and you would have the rewards of a nicely done biography of someone who is working towards living an exemplary life. But there is more. Jaworski has accumulated some important insights into leadership that are well worth knowing. He makes an appealing case for servant leadership (the leader looks out for the group, rather than his self-interest). He also tells a fascinating tale of running the scenario development work at Royal Dutch Shell for 4 years. From this, he develops what seemed to me to be a profound insight: Scenarios can be used both to prepare for the future by helping us think through it in advance, and to create the future. That last thought provided me with a nice epiphany. Although I was very familiar with the Shell planning technique from the business literature and from talking to Arie de Geus about it, this implication had never dawned on me. I deeply appreciate learning this.Beyond that, the book is a living testament to the importance of finding your true self and listening to the wee small voice of intuition that can steer you in the right direction. Jaworski to his credit has been quite willing to do both, and it has made all the difference.Many books on leadership talk about the role as a state of being. That usually leaves me confused. Jaworski makes the same point, but through his personal history I was able to understand what he meant. At another level, I found the book to be quite astonishing because it paralleled my own personal journal. I started out as a lawyer, heeded my inner voice to become a management consultant, and then heeded my inner voice again to become an author to spread important ideas about how people can become more effective in working with one another. He was fascinated by how to use scenarios to help the political transition in South Africa. I founde

Many books on leadership are written for managers or those unique individuals who will save the world. This book, "Synchronicity," sheds some light on that community. More important to me, it shed a light into some of the far, dusty corners of my personal life. I'm newly 48 years old with many different jobs in the past and new challenges staring me in my face. Mr. Jaworski's scenarios and suggestions did a good job with two areas: (1) it rattled me into reviewing the path that I have been working on and (2) it bolstered me up in realizing that following "gut feelings" is not just magic, it's hard work. So? Well, it's my path, my life but now I have a different way to look positively at the past. At the same time Mr. Jaworski has given me new ways of looking ahead, sharpened my survival senses. Thanks to "Synchronicity," I may not change the world you know but, I am changing the world immediately around me... for the better. ----Geo.Brett (not the baseball player)

Joseph Jaworski has written "the" book on leadership for the 1990's. Not unlike Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Jaworski's Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership serves up a tale of personal discovery of such magnitude as to speak to the very heart and soul of the reader. Drawing heavily from Robert Greenleaf's Servant Leadership, Jaworski describes in compelling form the essential character of leadership founded on servant as leader. Reading Jaworski is like reading a modern-day Paul: his message that we can control our future by allowing life to unfold through us -- not despite us -- is comforting in this era when we all seem to be cascading toward a destiny over which we have little or no control. Read this book. Accept its invitation to initiate your own journey of self-discovery and enlightenment.