Book Image

Flow-based Leadership: What the Best Firefighters can Teach You about Leadership and Making Hard Decisions

By : Judith L. Glick-Smith Ph.D
Book Image

Flow-based Leadership: What the Best Firefighters can Teach You about Leadership and Making Hard Decisions

By: Judith L. Glick-Smith Ph.D

Overview of this book

There comes a day when we have to make a tough decision under stress. That decision might change the course of our life. Flow-Based Leadership helps you improve your decision-making skills through the use of some great real-life stories of firefighters. The book first introduces the feeling called ‘flow’—teaching by example its importance in decision-making. Next, you’ll explore various techniques to initiate flow in critical situations and how to respond when flow doesn’t occur as expected. You will learn how to implement flow-based decision making and flow based-leadership within personal and professional circumstances. You will next encounter an extreme, experiential training program called Georgia Smoke Diver (GSD), and how it helps special military forces like Navy Seals and Army Rangers to maintain a calm focus in chaotic situations. Towards the end, the book uses the GSD program to describe the flow-based organizational framework and how it can be integrated into your life and workplace to achieve better decision-making skills. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to use flow-based leadership in your personal and professional life maintain clarity and confidence under duress.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Introduction

“For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax.”

—Alan Watts

September 11, 2001 began as a glorious morning. The sky over New York City was clear, a cloudless lapis blue. Joel Kanasky, a firefighter for the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) Rescue Company 1, was teaching a scuba diving class when he heard about the first plane hitting the World Trade Center. As he made his way downtown, he could see the smoke and flames breaching the beautiful sky. He watched, horrified, along with the rest of us as the South Tower fell. He arrived at the site around forty minutes after his company deployed.

He entered the lobby of the North Tower looking for his crew. He approached a battalion chief—according to Joel, “a tough old Marine-coot”—who died later that day when the North Tower fell. The chief gave Joel an order to get some hydraulic jacks and torches, because there were steel beams pinning...