The Doug Noll Show

My guest is Dan Millstein, author of the book The One Minute Miracle. Dan spent 18 years in prisons around the world teaching inmates how to be self-aware, non-reactive teachers of peace. His book explains a simple and elegant guided meditation composed of twelve affirmations and twelve yoga hand positions, called mudras. As each affirmation is spoken, the hands change to a different position. This simple ceremony changed prisoners and prison populations, sometimes dramatically. Today, Dan is putting out the idea of creating 108 million Teachers of Peace. Again, by affirmation, he wonders what would happen if 108 million people declared themselves each to be a Teacher Peace. More information about Dan and his work can be found at www.visionsforprisons.com and www.teacherofpeace.com . Join us for a interesting conversation about Dan’s work.
http://www.teacherofpeace.com

Dan Millstein, Author of "The One Minute Miracle"
http://www.teacherofpeace.com

Dan Millstein, Author of "The One Minute Miracle"
http://www.teacherofpeace.com

Dan Millstein, Author of "The One Minute Miracle"
http://www.teacherofpeace.com

Is collaboration is the key to success in life and in preserving our planet? Kare Anderson thinks so. Kare is an Emmy-winning former NBC reporter and Wall Street Journal reporter and is the author of the books SmartPartnering, Resolving Conflict Sooner, Beauty Inside Out and LikeAbility. She publishes weekly pocasts about her Moving From Me to We project and the Say it Better newsletter. As David Rockefeller said after hearing her speak, "Kare forever changes how you see yourself and your world." Kare talks to us about the simple ways we can deal with conflict constructively and how use the concept of partnership to expand our influence beyond our daily lives.

More with Kare Anderson

More with Kare Anderson

As we are all too aware, we are in the midst of a presidential election. Most everyone agrees that our country needs real leadership, which raises the question what should a presidential leader look like. How do we look for intelligent leadership in the next president? Will eitherSenator McCain or Senator Obama be a good leader based on what we see so far? There are a lot of tough issues for this country to face so the question is not trivial. David Russell is an acknowledged expert in helping entrepreneurs succeed. He has authored the book, Success With People, and has been under contract with Microsoft for the last 2 years to teach their partners how to hire, manage, develop and retain great people. More about Dave’s work can be found at his website, successwithpeople.com. We start with the question of how political leadership differs from business leadership. The principal difference seems to be that political leaders, especially presidential candidates, are in the spotlight all of the time. Every move and word must be calculated and planned. Because the scrutiny is so intense, there is little room for error. Thus, the safe path is usually blandness and ambiguity. Taking this into account, the two most important leadership attributes in a presidential candidate should be integrity and vision. Integrity tells us that a presidential candidate will be consistent to his stated set of values, giving us some certainty and predictability about his performance. Vision tells us what fundamentally, a presidential candidate sees as the direction of the country in the next four years.

To what degree does the operation of a campaign give us some indication of leadership ability? Dave and I agree that it provides some indication of two aspects of leadership. First, campaign operations tell us how well the candidate selects the people to carry out the tasks of the campaign. If good, competent people are selected, the campaign should be seen as a smooth running operation. Second, campaign operations tells how well the candidate sets a vision, sets goals, holds people accountable, and then moves out of the way to let people do their jobs. Under these criteria, Senator McCain does not show as much leadership as Senator Obama. To what degree does experience predict future performance? We talk about how CEOs are selected on the basis of their track record. No corporate board would select a leader without knowing a lot about the leader’s experience and history. In this election, we know a lot about Senator McCain because he has been in public service his complete adult life. We know much less about Senator Obama because he is younger and his term of service is much shorter. We know that McCain makes fast decisions and Obama tends to be more deliberate. We can expect to see these attributes carry forward into the presidency.

I ask Dave what he would teach if he were engaged to teach leadership development to the incoming administration. We learn that the most important goal of the transition team will be to define the fundamental difference the administration wants to make in the next four years. What kind of difference does the administration want to make? This alone will set the tone for all of the decisions and policies that will follow.

Richard, a caller from San Francisco, asks Dave what common values should be uniting the country. Dave lists off twelve values, including seeking the common good, equality,, faith, family, justice, liberty, life, privacy, pursuit of happiness, responsibility, thankfulness, and truth. Dave concludes by telling people the best way to assure selection of a great leader is to stay informed and be involved.