Leadership Results

Chapter 14 A call to decisive, bold action and results

Begin, be bold, and venture to be wise.

— Horace

The village chief and the tsunami

An old Japanese tale recounts how a highly respected village chief one day felt a tremor while looking down from his house on a hilltop. He saw the sea quickly pulling away from the land and puzzled villagers running onto the beach. Without hesitation, he instructed his grandson to set fire to the large freshly harvested rice stacks on the hill.

The huge fire caught the villagers' attention: their most precious asset was being destroyed. Alarmed and enraged they quickly ran uphill from the shore to extinguish the flames. Then, in horror, they watched from safe ground as the tsunami wiped out the village. The chief was recognised as a hero as it became clear he had set the fire to save the villagers.

• What's the moral of this story?
• How does it apply to you?
• How can you save your village?
• Furthermore, how can you contribute to saving our global village?

Crises call for decisive and bold action. Inaction leads to missed opportunities, no change in the status quo, and no improvements in results. In the worst-case scenario, inaction causes human suffering or lost lives.

Let me make it perfectly clear that I'm not advocating setting fire to anything! The story actually suggests a much better course of action.

To my mind, the chief was able to read the signs in the suddenly changing context by sensing the tremor and looking at the bigger ...