The spirit of leadership

Peter Cammock presented his poetic vision of hope for the world at the 2005 Winter Lectures. To realise his vision Cammock says: "We need a type of leadership that goes beyond rationality; we need a type of leadership that has a touch of soul."

Cammock considers great leadership might have its origins in spirituality which he defined by means of Peter Vaill's term spiritual condition: "…the feeling individuals have about the fundamental meaning of who they are, what they are doing, and the contributions they are making."

We need to bring our spiritual condition into the conversation if we are to be effective leaders. Although the stakes are high, many of us are ill-equipped to participate in such a deep dialogue, because as Cammock points out:

We live in a society that's put off the knowledge of ourselves very often for a knowledge and utilisation of the world external to us and in the process of our life of work, in the pursuit of our ambitions, we very often lose connection with ourselves—we become washed away.

Cammock believes the language we need to have this conversation is what David Whyte calls the "despised poems." Cammock quotes from Whyte's book Crossing the Unknown Sea:

For a real conversation we need a real language. To my mind that is the language not enshrined in business books or manuals but in our great literary traditions. Keats or Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson or Mary Oliver often say more in one line about the invisible structures that make up the average workday than a whole shelf of contemporary business books.