By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to cope with an ever- changing workplace. Reading time: 3:15.

If leadership is an art, then artist M.C. Escher must be The Leader’s patron saint.

The famed artist, who expressed 3-D images in a 2-D format in lithographs with a flair for physics-defying perspective, seemed to capture the chaos and paradox of change agentry that envelops every leader.

After all a leader’s world often seems upside down and turned around — a topsy turvy world where the floors seem like ceilings; the tables tops become streets and people walking on staircases seem to be going both up and down.

M.C. Escher’s art did all that and more.

Escher’s paintings reflect the conflicting paradoxical world of a leader who is regularly gored on the horns of a dilemma.

Escher’s paintings also reflect the conflicting paradoxical world a leader regularly challenged to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. That paradox is the test of a first-rate mind as author F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed.

No wonder poet Rudyard Kipling suggested that leaders be able to meet with both triumph and disaster and “treat those two imposters just the same or walk with kings nor lose the common touch.”

Twisting and turning against the winds of change, leaders come to see the paradoxical -the conflicting and complex — as normal business conditions.

In fact, Paradox Thinking is so common that you’d think your brain would come wired with sideswipe safety switch like the switch that every traffic light is built with Continue reading “M.C. Escher: Drawing Out the Paradox of a Leader” →