Leadership 2017
Secrets to Being a World-Changer
A two-part leadership e-book I was invited by IEEE-USA to write with my good friend Jonathan Chew - distilling what we'd learned as Disney Imagineers into a framework for leading change, the "being" in Part 1 and the "doing" in Part 2.
- Authorship
- Leadership
- Public Speaking
I was invited by IEEE-USA to write a book about leadership. With my good friend, Jonathan Chew, we set out to produce a two-part series that combined much of what we’d learned at the time - working side by side as Imagineers in the research-and-development arm of The Walt Disney Company.
The book grew out of a talk we gave at the 2016 IEEE-USA Future Leaders Forum and a follow-up webinar, Knowing the Secret to Being a World Changer. There was enough interest that IEEE-USA asked us to turn it into something people could keep.
Two parts: being and doing
We split leadership into the two halves we kept coming back to.
Part 1 - The Being of Leadership is about the mindset: who you have to be before you can change anything. It came out through IEEE-USA in 2017.
Part 2 - The Doing of Leadership is the other half - actually performing the world-changing actions once the mindset is in place. It followed in June 2017.
The Circles of VICtory
The framework at the heart of the book is what we called the Circles of VICtory - three overlapping circles that name the ingredients we saw in every great leader we admired:
- Vision - something to be passionate about, anchored in what you believe.
- Imagination - the ability to see the world from more than one perspective.
- Creativity - the methodologies to turn those perspectives into novel solutions.
Layered on top is Ikigai, the Japanese idea of “a reason to get up in the morning,” which braids together what you’re good at, what you’re willing to do, what you’re paid for, and what you genuinely want to do. Find where those meet, and you’ve found where to point all that vision, imagination, and creativity.
Writing it with Jonathan was a chance to step back from the day-to-day of building rides and ask what actually made the people around us effective - and then to hand that answer to the next group of engineers trying to change their corner of the world.