Beyond Leadership: Balancing Economics, Ethics and Ecology, Revised Edition

Conclusion

Outlook, insight

All this may appear, at first sight, rather complex and may even overwhelm. However, after you have gone through a few rounds of this process, it becomes a very lucid, natural, and almost an automatic undertaking. It is just a question of learning how to learn. Like any other learning capability it takes a little time and effort, but if you pursue it with full faith and trust in the process, and with a sense of determination and commitment, it takes much less time and effort than you may imagine at the outset. Eventually it can become a natural way of thinking, a way of life.

The three processes – reflective, intuitive, and integrative visioning – in combination lead to a sustainable peak performance which is the goal of any new-paradigm manager (see figure 5.6). To put it differently, it involves:

• developing an understanding of whatever is in sight in the external environment
• looking inside your own internal “environment,” or inner dynamics, and developing what we may call insight
• finally, integrating with this outlook your insight – the combination or synthesis will generate what we may call your unique “inlook”

Figure 5.6

The interesting point is that such an “inlook,” or the governing attitude with which you function, is not a reactive posture or an ad hoc approach, but a proactive one. It is a deep-rooted, connected, and integrated attitude based ...