“Keep close to Nature’s heart…and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.” — John Muir
My wife and I spent this week hiking in the Yosemite National Park in California. If you don’t know this place, put it high on your list of must-see locations. The nearly 1,200 square miles of this park contain some of the most awesome scenery in the world.
Yosemite was designated a national park in 1890 after strenuous advocacy by John Muir, an early preservationist and founder of the Sierra Club. Muir threw himself into the midst of a debate about the formation of the 3,600-foot deep valley that is the centerpiece of Yosemite. A leading geologist of the day, Josiah Whitney, attributed the valley to a subsidence of land caused by the movement of tectonic plates in the earth’s crust, much like what happened to the Great Rift Valley in Kenya. But Muir assembled evidence to suggest that the valley was gouged out by extensive glacial activity. More importantly, Muir had the sense that the Yosemite region was a natural area of great importance. His arguments, eventually sustained by a century of scientific research, held that Yosemite stood out as an area of unusual geological and biological convergence. The park is in the midst of the Sierra Nevada range, between the San Joaquin Valley (the enormous and fertile central valley of California) and the Great Basin (arid land between the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada Range). The unusual topography of this region sheltered and sustained unusual life-forms, the most prominent of which are the Giant Sequoia trees. On the basis of careful study and first-hand observation, John Muir connected the dots about the uniqueness of Yosemite.
John Muir’s example is interesting for many reasons. But for those interested in the development of leaders, he helps to illustrate that the best leaders display a heightened awareness, a sensitivity to what is going on. The biographies of transformational leaders in business tend to tell similar stories: the leaders got close to the real situation and started connecting the dots. The capacity to draw game-changing inferences is, I think, one of the most inscrutable qualities of leadership. And it is challenging to develop. I believe that intellectual frameworks help, but that the best approach is through learning-by-doing. John Muir helps us see that by getting out into the field, the leader deepens his or her capacities for observation and sensitivity to the incongruities in the environment. As Muir says, it is important to “break clear away, once in a while.”
Posted by Robert Bruner at 08/02/2008 09:21:32 PM