Author: Michael M. Reuter
Great entrepreneurs are the leaders who are innovators capable of creating new and better ways of producing and distributing products and services. Theirs is the excitement and challenge of always seeking to know what they don’t know.
Recently, a friend and former senior executive, shared with me a leadership learning exercise he did with his senior executive team. He would invite them to his office, and taking them to a window he would ask them what they saw. They would dutifully enumerate what they observed on the corporate campus below. He would then take them to a different window in his office and again ask what they could see. This window faced grassy hills and a mountain. They would again describe the scene – the hills, the mountain and other objects in view.
He would then ask: “What do you see behind the mountain?” The inevitable response, he said, was: “What do you mean? Are you kidding me? We can’t see behind the mountain.” He would again ask the same question: “What do you see behind the mountain.” Frustrated, the senior executives would tell him again that “you can’t see behind the mountain, that it wasn’t possible.’ At this point, he said, he would look at each of them and say: “You are not a leader. If you were a leader, you would be able to see behind the mountain. I can see behind the mountain.” This was the moment of great teaching and great learning.
He told them that as leaders they would be presented great challenges (their mountains) during their careers. It is the responsibility of the great leader to see what no one else is able to see, to see beyond the mountain, and then take their people on a journey to that place. It would be their vision that would inspire and motivate others to follow them, and achieve what they once could not see and thought impossible.
Great entrepreneur leaders, look at the mountains around you. Look at them deeply. See beyond them. To do this you may need to see through different lenses; maybe you will have to step back or sideways to see them from a new perspective. Maybe you will discover that the mountain is just a pile of rocks. But maybe, just maybe, you will see something different, and remember the words of Antoine Saint-Exupery: “A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.” May you always see your own magnificent cathedrals, and build them with passion, love and caring.
About Michael M. Reuter
Professor Reuter is the Stillman School’s Director of the Center for Leadership Development at Seton Hall University, the Stillman School’s Honors Program. Over the past 22 years, Professor Reuter has been an executive coach and mentor, and has led and implemented many successful organizational change management initiatives in major corporations. His passion for leadership studies and understanding their operational application is reflected in his work with senior executives He writes a weekly newsletter, Three Minute Leadership, for a broad spectrum of business leaders, students and people he coaches and mentors addressing various topics on the subject of leadership. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the United States Hispanic Advocacy Association (USHAA), and also the Board’s Ambassador for Leadership. He is also the Chairman of the Board of Directors for WitnessHOPE and the Executive Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Raise Hope Foundation.
