Values-driven systems are wired for flexibility. The paradox is that you have to be a strong leader to be a flexible one. Just like a willow trunk’s extra thickness allows its branches to move freely with the wind, a business that’s well rooted in its values has fundamental flexibility. 

Values-driven cultures are more flexible by nature because there’s more freedom in day-to-day decision-making. Since values-based accountability transcends simple goals and numbers, people can make decisions that are good for people and good for business.

Studies confirm that values-driven cultures have higher profits, stakeholder loyalty, and innovation. Flexing requires doing, flexibility is a state of being. Being leaderful means that you flex your flexibility muscle by developing the culture around you. How do you do that? Keep asking questions about values and keep working to fulfill them.

French philosopher, de Chardin died the year I was born but I feel that he was describing now - now is the time we must discover a deeper sense of what fuels us:

“The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

I got from Middle School through a doctoral program without having to read "Don Quixote," a centuries old Spanish hero's journey novel about a guy who was somehow guilty of windmill fighting.

So I don't know what it's "supposed" to mean but for me the meaning of fighting windmills is constantly evolving. I wonder about how much time we spend engaged with an issue because it's waving its arms in front of us? In my own and my   executive coaching clients' lives, seems like a lot.

Moving arms are important to address. But the paths around them, and the promised land beyond them, sometimes mean that the arms spinning in front of us are addressed best by not creating an epic drama out of them. That requires being both present to waving arms by hearing what they are and are not saying, and also by being present to the evolutionary impulse that says there's freedom to explore the whole world by taking just a few steps to the left or the right of what stops us.

Leaders negotiate windmills best when they understand that

I see a lot of catalyzing in my executive coaching practice - a lot of flame-sparking. I also see people putting out a lot of fires. It's not hard to imagine which ones are getting more bang for their buck. So it's no surprise that catalytic coaching pays up to 689% return on investment while coaching for fire containment is still a respectable 150% roi.

Catalytic coaching happens in cultures that can fuel it. They'll likely do well whether or not they coach. It's not that sparks don't cause unintended flames - for better and for worse, they do.

But sparks fired with conscious intention and shared vision create very different kinds of fires than those of political gamesmanship. Fire is a transmutational force.

A leader has to ask the question every culture has had to face for all of human history: "how do we keep our fire?"

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"We can choose to make the success of all humanity our personal business. We can choose to be audacious enough to take responsibility for the entire human family. We can choose to make our love for the World what our lives are really about. Each of us now has the opportunity, the privilege to make a difference in creating a World that works for all of us. It will require courage, audacity and heart. It is much more radical than a revolution, it is the beginning of a transformation in the quality of life on our planet. You have the power to fire a shot heard around the World.

If not you, who? If not here, where? If not now, when?"

-- Werner Erhard, 1979

"What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of audacity. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but expressing them. And so we cannot avoid this conclusion: it is biologically evident that to gain control of passion and so make it serve spirit must be a condition of progress.

Sooner or later, then, the world will brush aside our incredulity and take this step : because whatever is the more true comes out into the open, and whatever is better is ultimately realized. The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire."

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1 May 1881 – 10 April 1955)

Deepak is clear and concise in these 7 Ways to develop leadership consciousness under his acronym LEADERS: Look & listen, Emotional bonding, Awareness, Doing, Empowerment, Responsibility, Synchronicity.

http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20121227230040-75054000-the-conscious-lifestyle-the-soul-of-leadership?trk=eml-mktg-condig-118-p2

My own breakdown on leaderfulness is LOVE: Look, Own, Value, Evolve

America is better off with this no-fix fix than with no fix at all. But this 11th hour "finger in the dyke" does not begin to address the fact that we stand at unprecedented fiscal, emotional, psychological, spiritual and moral cliffs. The New Year political drama, put on by the most ineffective Congress ever, didn't really change our cliff hanger status because it's only a bandaid on a broken economic system that does not adequately value what's most important to people. When you factor in that our economic ledge is made up of many times the amount of debt as money, you have to question whether or not we were over the cliffs that matter most long before this last fiscal deadline.

While personal and corporate taxes were the holiday headlines, the billions of dollars being cut from the military industry brought out the sponsors of a drama that was situated among stories about assault weapons sales soaring to new heights while babies are being mourned as a result of there already being one too many. Disproportionately hardwiring our economy to death and destruction was a cliff jump we slept through and it's part of the reason myopic fiscal deals are trumping our highest ideals.

This deal doesn't change much about people's personal cliffs and life at the cliff's edge makes it hard to engage in the civic vitality required for an economy that's healthy enough to support a robust democracy. It's time to stop dangling off cliffs and to demand that leadership stop the reckless endangerment of our citizenry and the obstruction of liberty and justice for all. Let's work for an economy that is truly of, by and for the people and that rests on the solid ground of all our kids going to bed safe, warm and fed. Because it's going to take redefining fiscal ground in order to climb to the mountain peaks that are the promise of democracy.

Joni Carley, D.Min, is a values-driven leadership & cultural development expert, V. P. of Global Vision Institute, co-leader of cultural transformation programs and leadership development in and around the United Nations, and former professor of Applied Ethics, Drexel U., co-author with Deepak Chopra & Jack Canfield of "Stepping Stones to Success, Vol. 1."

Dr. Joni's 4 step LOVE (Look, Own, Value, Evolve) formula helps translate controversial and complicated topics for emotional buy-in to actionable, everyday choices. She establishes common ground where opposing perspectives can get at the root of today’s issues.

“The world’s news requires that we frame it in hope and deeper truths so that we make our wisest choices about what it’s telling us.”  Dr. Joni

We can't legislate enough or hire enough cops to solve our gun violance problem. We need to have a different conversation - one that says "we first and foremost value having our babies go to bed safe, warm and fed." Whether we register or ban automatics and handguns, we are on a social trajectory that can't be solved by ammo counts.

We have to stop telling ourselves stories that keep us on the rat wheel of a sick cultural story with horrific endings. We can honor the dead in Connecticut, who aren't all that much different from the dead city kids who got caught in crossfires, by demanding that media tell new stories using a lens for greatest good.

There's something very wrong in how hard it is to live with ourselves. Americans represent 5% of the world's population but we have 25% of the world's prisoners. What's the connection between those statistics and 20 babies being killed in Connecticut?

We're negotiating politics and law with too little concern for civility and justice. We tell relentless stories about ourselves in the media that say we're ruthless, violent people and news anchors ask questions of two sides of the same dysfunctional box. I'd like to bring forward new perspective for new stories that reflect our interdependency - that help us remember that those are all of our dead babies in Connecticut.

The recent United Nations unanimous General Assembly call for a New Economic Paradigm based on Happiness and Wellbeing put an international stake in the ground. The barely represented values-driven sector, which pulls from left, right, up, down and center, needs to claim its voice and demand that media ask different questions. Because whoever is telling the stories is who's controlling the culture.

An evening of prime time tv is a good reflection of why politicians who were elected to preserve such a rotten interpretation of freedom are having such a hard time doing anything productive. They're not functioning on the solid ground of values - they're putting duct tape on horribly antiquated ideas of democracy. The truth is they can't just legislate the changes we need, although they could get out of the way of it a lot better.

What can I do? Every time I think or talk about the heartbreak in Connecticut, rather than consider more, better or different laws or politics, I can shift the conversation to ask:

What child can I bring comfort to today? What accountability will I hold my elected official to? What resources are going toward symptoms and what can I do about redirecting those resources proactively toward safe, fed and warm kids? What news program will I switch off because it's proliferating a story I don't want to live in? What contribution can I make toward a new story emerging? How can I shift from talking about guns and the pain that still rips at my heart to honoring those lives as a wake up call for a new kind of conversation about fundamental changes that almost seem too big to think about?

When we ask new questions, we'll get different story content. We have to wrestle with our personal participation in the deadliness of our system and make choices toward personal and civic activities that they are geared toward greatest good - a good that can never be fully defined but makes a nonetheless rock solid platform for creating a world with liberty and justice for all.

The Harvard Business Review just published an article called

In his Harvard Business Review article, "Petraeus and the Rise of Narcissistic Leaders, Jeffrey Pfeffer connects dots between marital affairs, narcissism and leadership.

The issue to me is who is awarding power to whom and why? The style of leadership that includes a special sense of invulnerability in the use of power is being replaced by an emerging values-driven paradigm.

The Old Paradigm shows the wear and tear of gender imbalance. Personal moral digression becomes the story because the dying paradigm does not effectively harness and unleash the human conditions of inevitable mistake-making, the primal urge of sexual vitality, and the universal desire for a compassionate and just culture.

The Old Paradigm mistakes power for narcissism and rewards accordingly. Like everything else, narcissism has a front and a back and requires the balance of wisdom, which usually requires gender equanimity. We’ve mistaken leadership for the type of bullying it takes for unchecked narcissism to last longest on the job in spite of erroneous assumptions that the leader is disproportionately more valuable than the team. We can measure this type of entropy now to put real numbers on what it's costing to value the wrong things.

In my private practice and work in and around the United Nations, especially on the unanimous General Assembly vote for a New Economic Paradigm based on Happiness and Wellbeing, I see a new valuation of power emerging and old valuations breaking down. There are excellent new ways of quantifying culture to achieve what I like to see as the balance of yin and yang - not just gender balance but a systemic balance point shift. The data’s in, the thought leadership is good and the ontological technology is excellent yet still relatively few companies are capitalizing on New Paradigm principles.

Old paradigms die hard – affairs are the tip of the iceberg and a lot easier to grapple with than the deep dive the world is starting to take toward rewarding what truly delivers on liberty and justice for all.

In his 10/30/12 NY Times article, "Still Waiting for the Narrator in Chief," Matt Bai writes about President Obama as a storyteller:

During an interview with Charlie Rose on CBS last summer Obama said it was the job of the president to “tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism,” and it was on this score that he had fallen short.

Obama took a lot of heat for his story stance, mostly in the form of pundits admonishing him to be more myopic. But he's onto something - in a democracy it is a leader's job to guide toward a cultural story that delivers on "liberty and justice for all."

It's been said that whoever is telling the story of a culture rules it. Obama lost his storytelling mojo for a bit but that doesn't diminish the foundational role of our national story and I'm glad he's on it.

This is a great article by Dan Waldschmidt in Business Insider:

20 Ways to Get What You Want Before you Even Want It

A few of my favorites:

5. Devote specific time each day to exercise, meditation, or therapy. Or all three.

I would expand on that to include journaling, playing an instrument, singing or dancing, making something...

In fact, I think there are 20 ways just within #5!

16. Forgive fast.  Forget about fairness. Protest cruelty. Be strong enough to believe in you.