Most good leaders work like Sherlock Homes and use Deductive Reasoning to create strategies. So they start with a very general premise and get down to specifics from that. In a way, the leader uses his abstract intelligence to create a mental construct first and then give it a more concrete form. So a marketing plan will have an abstract idea like building a house that can fly and then the leader gets down to the specifics like what would that house be like and how in this world would it fly, its dimensions, weight, infrastructure and the likes.
Many a times I see leaders coming out with great ideas but they don’t know how to implement them. They are unable to travel from abstract to concrete intelligence. They do not know how to convert ideas into reality. When they try to travel the path, they fail. They are so caught up in the abstractedness of the idea that they keep floating in abstractedness in a loop and are unable to shape the idea and bring it to reality. Conversely, many leaders lack abstract intelligence and they are so concrete that they are unable to look beyond their five senses.
Similarly, a good consultant is the one who has the skill to conceptualize at abstract level but then bring it down to concrete level and implement it. Consultants usually prefer to work at abstract level and do not prefer to work at concrete/ implementation level. People who work only at abstract level have a lot of good ideas, find what is wrong at ease but find it difficult to implement.
A good leader therefore, travels from “Concrete to Abstract” and “Abstract to Concrete” seamlessly as per the need of the situation. The concept is very similar to “Inductive and Deductive Reasoning” or “Maco and Micro level working”. A good leader would be comfortable with both the worlds but chooses wisely where he should operate. A strategy has to be visualized at macro or abstract level but needs to be worked upon at micro or concrete level. A leader who has difficulty with either of them will be dependent on others to do his work.
