Five Influences on Dr. Cheryl Lentz’s Refractive Thinking

Where does Dr. Cheryl Lentz derive inspiration for her refractive thinking? After her interview on Smashing the Plateau, she provided a group of five thinkers that she identified as having been particularly important to the development of her ideas:

1. Peter Senge: MIT professor, systems scientist, and author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Lentz writes that she is “a big proponent of systems thinking.”

2. John Maxwell: The 360 Degree Leader: Developing Your Influence from Anywhere in the Organization. This book, Lentz notes, teaches you to “lead from where you find yourself—lead from above, below or from the middle. Leadership is a function or behavior, not a title.”

3. Jim Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner, The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations: “Their ‘Jigsaw Puzzle Principle’ is one of my favorite leadership theories.”

4. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged / The Fountainhead. Lentz writes, “I will allow nothing above the judgment above my own mind. We have to trust ourselves.  If everyone is going in one direction, I tend to be the one running in the opposite direction.”

5. Albert Einstein. Lentz has based YouTube videos, book chapters, and university lectures on what we can learn from Einstein. Here, she simply adds: “To understand and pursue what is not yet created. To ask ‘Why not?’  Or ‘What else is there?’ ”