Leadership is for Shrimps by Paul Cook

This week marked the start of the Chinese Lunar New Year 2013, the Year of the Snake.  One of the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac, the snake signifies cleverness and tenacity and is associated with the element of fire.  I strongly recommend that in these essential times for leaders it should have been the year of the Mantis shrimp.

I may have to explain further.

Biological reasons as follows.

Do you cut the grass or mow the lawn, eat scones or sconns, visit the cinema to watch a movie or go up the pictures to see a film?  There is of course the possibility that you do none of these things or the higher percentage bet is that you do and describe them differently.  The mathematical possibilities of differing descriptive behaviour are slightly more than the number of atoms in the known universe and that’s a lot because Brian Cox told me.  Through BBC’s edifying ‘Star Gazing’ and ‘The wonders of life’, Professor Brian Cox has recently transported the viewing public into an awareness and photographically dazzling aspect of, well, everything; from the smallest nucleus within an atom core to the furthest most planets in our vast galaxies.  In last week’s episode (Wonders of Life) Professor Cox described eyesight and the Mantis Shrimp.  Said crustacean is a remarkable creature in many ways, one of which is its eyesight; us Homo Sapiens have what is known as binocular vision which means two separate eyes with one view cross referenced to each other to give depth, colour, light, distance and height; all in all quite useful (particularly when mowing the lawn) .  The Mantis shrimp has trinocular vision in each eye which gives a hundredfold perception on our own.  It can see ahead of its competition, anticipate risk at lightning speed, comprehend muti dimensions and ultimately command its environment.  What must that creature really see of the world and how on earth did they find that out?

In business it is fortunate that we only have to build rapport with humans and not spiny, bottom feeding, dangerous predators… I think I may know what some of you may be thinking at this point.  So with our binocular perception of the world it is incredible that we all have completely diverse perceptions of our own universe; this then inevitably leads to unalike experiences, dissimilar ideas, values, beliefs and of course ways, of expressing it all.  How do we understand everyone all the time?

As a highly effective leader in business it is essential to understand as many variants as possible, to have situational perception, to connect, to build rapport, to communicate at all levels, to understand, to have our own trinocular vision.  It then also follows that your successful talented leaders need these skills.

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I did notice that most of the thalassic creatures that came a little too close to the shrimp tended to get eaten by it.  So how would you build rapport with such a highly tuned organism?  Take it to the pictures of course.