A Picture of Greatness

In the last blog, I made the claim that it is possible to measure greatness.  In this blog, I hope to help you visualize greatness.  Let me be clear – these are not my ideas, but are copied from Koestenbaum’s book Leadership, The Inner Side of Greatness.  Per Koestenbaum’s Leadership Diamond model, the picture of greatness looks like this:¹

The bigger the diamond, the better the leadership.  However, it is critical to expand all principles of greatness.  If a single principle is collapsed, Koestenbaum refers to it as a “collapsed mind.”  For example, Hitler had vision, was grounded in reality, and acted in courage, BUT Hitler had no principle of ethics.  Hitler’s leadership diamond would look like this:

Since I am engineer by training, a generalization that could be made is that many engineers are strongly grounded in reality and ethics, but less strong in vision and courage.  That leadership diamond would look like this:

Here is a person has with great visions, collects endless facts, and is a nice person. But when it comes to courage – to initiative, to taking action – they are on vacation.

This person is friendly enough and, unfortunately, also courageous. However, since they have no sense of reality, they are also dangerous. In fact, they are the one who spends all your money.

This person is an s.o.b. – great vision, relentlessly pragmatic – but people, what are they? People are numbers, objects, instruments, things – not souls and centers of feelings.

This person has courage, the team spirit, and the facts for leadership, but does not know where they are going! Complaints against this kind of boss are very frequent.