By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to help you integrate various parts of your planning process. Reading time: 3:29

Imagine owning what one author called a “wonderfully complex machine – an assembling of struts, ties, springs, pulleys, levers, joints, hinges, sockets, tanks, pipes, values, sheaths, pumps, exchanges and filters?” Now imagine that machine so well designed that it can run 90 or more years without missing a beat.

You don’t have to imagine it. You own it. Your body.

As Shakespeare observed in Hamlet: “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, how admirable in action.” And how magnificent in composition, according to the Body Almanac by Neil McAleer.

So magnificent that if the human body’s DNA material could be uncoiled, it would stretch from the earth to the sun -AND BACK-1,000 times.

So magnificent that your body is honeycombed with 60,000 miles of blood vessels — enough to stretch twice around the world .

So magnificent your heart will pump 56 million gallons of blood in 72-year lifetime — enough to fill the tanks of more than 2,000 Boeing 747 jets!

So what does all that BODY of knowledge trivia have to do with leadership? Everything.

I find that when I am having difficulty trying to integrate various parts of a strategic plan, I pause and pull out a fact sheet I have created for myself over the years on the systems of the human body.

I marvel at the thought of the body’s 45-miles of nerves. I ‘m in awe thinking that 35 million digestive glands are now working on the pizza I just ate. I’m amazed at the single red blood cell that can travel 950 miles in four months — the equivalent of a human traveling 80,000 times around the earth (two billion miles).

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