In this monologue, the speaker reflects on the concept of leading from the heart, tracing the evolution of leadership paradigms from the industrial era’s focus on manual labor (the "hands" phase), through the information age’s emphasis on knowledge and intellect (the "head" phase), to the emerging heart‑centered model that prioritizes emotional intelligence and humility. Citing Julian Birkinshaw’s three‑phase framework, the speaker argues that in today’s fast‑changing, uncertain environment, knowledge alone is insufficient; leaders must cultivate heart qualities to navigate complexity. The discussion then pivots to an interview with Jenara Gorengoreng, an Aboriginal woman who links Robert Kegan’s theory of sacred leadership with 60,000‑year‑old Aboriginal eldership traditions, highlighting that true leaders are chosen by the group and embody humility, conflict transformation, and collective responsibility. The overall narrative suggests a return to pre‑industrial, human‑centric roots, stripping away modern assumptions about authority and expertise.
Chapters
What does it mean to you to lead from the heart? Yeah, I'm happy to answer as, as the millennial in the conversation, I guess. I think I was thinking as you were speaking, Mark, that I, I think the first time I started to think about this was back in 2014 at a conference for where I saw a London Business School professor called Julian Birkinshaw giving a talk. And he was sort of showing how, going back to the Industrial Revolution, we've had kind of 3 phases of leadership in terms of the mindset and the assumptions we make. And the first was in the industrial era, you could summarize it as hands, that we needed people to operate machines. We just needed bodies. And if you could get human power, that was how you succeeded in the industrial era. And because it was pretty menial work, then you needed to crack the whip and you needed to micromanage people, because otherwise they wouldn't do this work. It wasn't very purposeful. And then the next phase was like, you could call it head, where we had the information knowledge era where as a leader, if you had knowledge, if you were smart, if you had information as a company, as an organization, that was like your capital. That was the way to be competitive. And then he said that the kind of emerging paradigm or what we're leading into now is heart. Nowadays with uncertainty and things, the pace of change being faster and all of that stuff, it's increasingly important to have leaders who are emotionally intelligent and leaders who can have conviction. Having all the knowledge in the world is not going to help you navigate complexity and uncertainty, because there's no possible way of knowing what the best decision is. So I think this heart, leading with heart piece, is really, really relevant., and I think for me what's interesting as well is in a way it's going back to pre-industrial, maybe even ancient ideas of leadership, and I interviewed someone the other day, Jenara Gorengoreng is her name, and she's an Aboriginal woman who studied, compared Robert Kegan's work around adult development, and kind of vertical development, and compared and contrasted it with Aboriginal eldership culture. And the kind of utmost pinnacle of leadership or consciousness is something that Robert Keegan calls sacred leadership. And in eldership sort of culture, in Aboriginal culture, which is like 60,000 years old, the principles of what makes a good leader— and leaders are chosen, they're not enforced, they're sort of selected by the group— qualities like humility, being able to resolve and transform conflicts with other people, you know, so they're very much leading from the heart qualities instead of knowledge or being the expert or being able to make the right decision or being responsible. So I think it's really interesting, this shift that we're seeing, and curious that in a way it's like going back to perhaps our pre-industrial roots and trying to get back to the essence of who we are as humans and kind of stripping away
