As the name implies, my primary topics are related to management and leadership. I’m mostly focused on smaller organizations because that’s what I know best (say, 10-200 people). But I suspect that the current climate leads to mandates to do more with less and “act entrepreneurially”, so there may be broader appeal. We’ll see.
Of course, I will probably venture off-topic into less business-related areas. Given my social-introverted and workaholic tendencies, those probably won’t be very common. Again, we’ll see.
Back to the name. I have two motivations for choosing da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man as the backdrop for my blog.
The first is that I believe passionately that great management is all about balance. There are many dualities that must be balanced in a business, starting with leadership vs. management. From there we move on to strategy vs. execution, growth vs. profit, internal vs external focus, passion vs. stability, observing vs. deciding, selling vs. delivering, force vs. empathy, and so on. With so many different dimensions, is it surprising that every organization feels out of balance somewhere? Achieving balance in one dimension is sure to knock you off-kilter in another.
Since I have an almost obsessive (you could say unbalanced) focus on balance, and the Vitruvian Man is a representation of the classic ideal balance of the human form, it seems like an appropriate symbol for my approach to management.
My second motivation is the artist himself. Da Vinci was the original Renaissance Man. While I don’t pretend to be nearly as versatile in general, I do have something to say about most facets of business management. Spending my entire career in small organizations, most of it in leadership or leadership-influence positions, has given me very broad exposure. And consulting to or partnering with much larger organizations for so much of that time adds another perspective that the average start-up junkie doesn’t typically have. So, in a somewhat da Vinci-like fashion, I’ll be dabbling across a broad range of management and leadership topics.
So, that’s that. Welcome aboard.
