Our Anniversary Favorites!
Today marks the one-year anniversary of Tune In To Leadership! We created this blog as a content extension of the Jazz Leadership Project to explore multi-dimensions of collaborative leadership. At the same time, we’ve endeavored to provide you perspectives that can inspire and evolve understanding, heighten interpersonal skills, and empower team synergy, whether that team is a family or folks at work or play.
We’ve compiled some of our favorite posts, under specific categories, to give you an opportunity to either reread posts you found particularly insightful or delve into posts that you may have missed.
Whichever the case, thanks for taking this journey with us!
Jazz Leadership Project Principles and Practices
The principles of jazz are the music’s value system; the practices as performed by human players embody and enact the principles. The wisdom of jazz as a metaphor applies to many dimensions of human life, including leadership, communication, and pragmatic action informed by seasoned insight.
Ralph Ellison: Principles in Action
Strengthening Community In Crisis: Shared Leadership
Practices: In the Shed & Big Ears
Practices: Improvisation & Swing
Communication: An Art to Strive For
Jazz Leadership and Business
Here’s where we demonstrate how and why jazz correlates with cutting-edge thought and application in business and leadership.
Ray Dalio and Jazz for Business
Role Players in Jazz and Business
The Case for Distributed Leadership in Jazz and Business
Pathways for Leadership Development
Angles of insight applying the creative process to leadership, with neuroscience, imagination, and qualitative growth as engines of maturity and heightened skill development.
Power of Imagination to Elevate Leadership
Dimensions of Curiosity: A Leadership Perspective
The Art of Collaborative Leadership
Leadership and the Soul of Curation
Embracing the Feminine: A Leadership Necessity
Mastery: The Fierce Urgency of Now
Values to Inform & Strengthen Leadership
Values—conscious or unconscious—motivate every decision made or action we take. Focusing on values allows us to perceive and interpret the underpinnings of our behavior. Leadership vision and strategy, based on higher values and purpose, when tuned to our particular circumstances can generate the energy and focus for positive change. Seen in this light, our values enable clear and precise understanding of motivation and become a basis of action plans informed by conscious culture.
The Problem and Promise of Values: Culture vs Race, Part 2
Cultivating Joy: A Leadership Essential
Authenticity in Leadership: ELiminating the Masks
Selflessness as a Leadership Goal
Intention: A Forcefield for Transformation
Culture and Transformational Leadership
Culture generally reflects the beliefs, values, and behaviors of a group. Our jazz-based model is inherently a cultural approach. Jazz enacts individual and group values through a creative process of learning and growth. Below are posts that demonstrate the way jazz artists and thought leaders in various domains enact leadership.
Artists as Transformative Leaders
Duke Ellington’s Rooted Cosmopolitanism
Charlie Parker’s Higher Octave
Miles Davis: A Leader of Leaders
Wynton Marsalis: Interdependent Leadership
Betty Carter: Leadership Through Challenge
Mary Lou Williams: Nurturing Leadership
Civic Leadership
In our first post, “Introduction to Collaborative Leadership,” we wrote:
Through this blog, we will demonstrate that jazz as collaborative leadership expands cultural awareness and choice, and allows us to achieve goals in life — whether through business, civic affairs, family and interpersonal relationships.”
From the very start, we’ve included civic engagement and leadership in our scope of concern. Here are a few posts in this vein which touch upon politics, our economic system, and visions of human wisdom beyond the finite concerns of the moment.
Stanley Crouch’s Vision of the Human Condition
As the United States braces for election night—and possibly weeks before a winner of the presidential election is definitively decided—our collective recognition of the urgent need for mature leadership in every sector of life and work has rarely been clearer. Indeed, in posts to come, we’ll share why this coming decade may be the most momentous shift in human life since the transition from the hunter-gatherer stage to the agricultural age.
This may sound to some like hyperbole, but without truly wise leadership, we could be facing another dark age. The choice is ours to make, before it’s too late. As Ken Wilber says, it’s imperative to wake up, grow up, clean up, and show up. Our task via Tune In To Leadership is to show and share the why and how we can enact such a developmental process with soul and with heart, with cultural intelligence, with inclusive vision and integrative values to transcend the error of our human ways before it becomes the end of our days.
Yes, it’s that serious. But while we realize the tragic potential before us, it’s also imperative to embrace joy and laughter along the way. Art itself serves to affirm life, which means that through art and culture we tap into the infinite game of life. To make it to the other side of this phase shift transition, we need models, archetypes, metaphors, and images to help. I submit that one of these is the leader who plays finite games with an infinite mindset. More on this in posts to come.
Bottom line: we’re stepping up to the challenge. May other citizens of the United States—and cosmopolitan citizens of the world—continue to do the same, for the sake of us all.