Leadership Lessons from Baking and Writing
With Thanksgiving last week and the final exam in my baking course this week, baking has occupied a lot of mindshare for me recently—specifically, how painstaking it can be.
A few weeks ago, I was making a chocolate ganache. The method to prepare it is to put a bunch of chocolate in a bowl, and then pour warm cream over it. And then you just stir.
And stir.
And keep stirring…very slowly.
The stirring goes well beyond the point at which your muscles hit fatigue and your mind loses interest.
And it looks like nothing is happening. But if you can sustain attention and technique, at some point, all of a sudden, it looks perfectly emulsified and ready to use.
On a similar note, over the holiday break, I had plenty of time to write. Except I wasn’t really writing—I was rewriting the book on strategic planning that I’ve been working on for over a year now. It felt very much like the ganache-making process—going over the same thing, over and over again. Except with writing, you realize just how much of your past work made no sense!
Still, the only solution is to keep massaging the text until it’s coherent.
That’s why I found this line from David Brooks’s new book, How to Know a Person, insightful: “The writer David Lodge once noted that 90 percent of what we call writing is actually reading. It’s going back over your work so you can change and improve it.”
One of my writing tasks was to draft the conclusion of the book. And I realized the main message was: If you want to create an organization with a strategic culture, it takes painstaking, day-by-day, meeting-by-meeting, nudge-by-nudge work. There’s no shortcut.
But hopefully, if you’re committed to leading on that journey, you look up one day and realize, We really have something great here.
Leadership Wisdom
This past week, the Pittsburgh Steelers fired its offensive coordinator. In his press conference, the Steelers head coach, Mike Tomlin, gave a masterclass in handling such situations. He took responsibility for the decision, explained the rationale and what would happen next, articulated his care for the person he fired, and expressed his belief in the potential of the remaining team.
He even used cliches like, “I did not come to this decision lightly,” but still managed to come across as sincere and credible. My favorite line was: “It’s just a personal belief of mine, from a leadership perspective, that it’s my role to absorb and protect those that I work with, and this doesn’t feel like that.”
It’s a long video, but Tomlin’s statement starts 1:20 in, and the first three minutes of his introduction is the good part.