Creative Strategy: Reconnecting Business and Innovation

CHAPTER 11

Leading from the Middle

You say that you have no keenness of wit. Be it so; but there are many other things of which you cannot say that nature has not endowed you. Show those qualities then which are perfectly in your power: sincerity, gravity, patience, contentment with your lot, frankness, dislike of superfluity, freedom from pettiness. Do you not see how many [leadership] qualities you are immediately able to exhibit, as to which you have no excuse of natural incapacity and unfitness?

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

At the time of the Beijing Olympics in 2008, one of the best selling books in China was Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. This seems unlikely, but if you read what may be one the earliest complete treatises on the nature of leadership you can see how Aurelius' writings, ascetic, rational, almost Confucian in tone, might appeal to both East and West. But while Meditations is currently well known in China, it is now largely overlooked in the English speaking world. This is a great shame, given that it contains a passage that we believe best sums up the qualities required for leading the development of a creative enterprise: in two centring ways.

Firstly, while innovation gives a creative strategy a heart and entrepreneurial drive gives it legs, it takes a quite different set of abilities to establish and lead an enterprise beyond the beachhead established through a successful launch. In the next and final part of the book we will explore how moving on from the ...