Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership

by Joseph Jaworski

In those early years, Warren Bennis, Tom Cronin, and Harlan Cleveland took a major role in the development of the curriculum. Harlan and his committee formulated their views as a series of eight propositions: 1. The trouble with American leaders is their lack of self-knowledge. 2. The trouble with American leaders is their lack of appreciation for the nature of leadership itself. 3. The trouble with American leaders is their focus on concepts that separate (communities, nations, disciplines, fields, methods, etc.), rather than concepts that express our interconnectedness. 4. The trouble with American leaders is their ignorance of the world and of U.S. interdependence—their lack of worldmindedness. 5. The trouble with American leaders is their inattention to values—forgetting to ask “Why?” and “What for?” 6. The trouble with American leaders is that they do not know how to make changes, to analyze “social architecture” [Warren Bennis’s term], and to create a team to make something different happen. 7. The trouble with American leaders is an insufficient appreciation of the relevance of stakeholders; of the implications of pluralism; and of the fact that nobody is in charge, and therefore each leader is partly in charge of the situation as a whole. 8. The trouble with American leaders is that they are not sufficiently aware of the context, or the external environment, of whatever it is they are responsible for doing. These ideas acted as the guiding principles of our program.