Leadership and creativity are linked at a core level. Great leaders are also artists in many areas. The following amazing photographs show us how, if we trust each other and find that core creative place, we can make the ordinary extraordinary!
 
In Japan, rice is essential to life, both for food and as a way of life. Rice planting season has made this very small island culture into one where there is cooperation and collaboration. You can only plant and harvest rice in certain seasons, and it takes the effort of many to make this happen. Once the basics of planting are no longer an issue, look at the creativity that can come with doing the same thing year after year and making it new and unique.
 
As I looked at these photographs I wondered who came up with the ideas. Then I thought……………who cares? It is a team effort, and the results speak for themselves. Having been to Japan many times, I was always fascinated by the lack of “me, me, me” ego so often seen in the West. Collaboration is at the heart of the hard work that went into these works of art. Enjoy.

Stunning crop art has sprung up across rice fields in Japan, but this is no alien creation.  The designs have been cleverly planted.

Farmers creating the huge displays use no ink or dye. Instead, different color rice plants have been precisely and strategically arranged and grown in the paddy fields. 

As summer progresses and the plants shoot up, the detailed artwork begins to emerge. 

A Sengoku  warrior on horseback has been created from hundreds  of thousands of rice plants.  The colors are created by using different varieties.  This photo was taken  in Inakadate, Japan. 

Napoleon on horseback can be seen from the skies. This was created by precision planting and months of planning by  villagers and farmers located in Inkadate, Japan. 

Fictional warrior Naoe Kanetsugu and his wife, Osen, whose lives are  featured on the television series Tenchijin, appear in  fields in the town of Yonezawa in the Yamagata prefecture of  Japan. 

This year, various artwork has popped up in other  rice-farming   areas of  Japan, including designs of deer dancers. Smaller works of crop art can be seen in other rice-farming areas of Japan, such as this image of Doraemon and deer dancers 

The  farmers create the murals  by planting little purple and yellow-leafed Kodaimai rice along with their local green-leafed  Tsugaru, a Roman variety, to create the colored patterns in the  time between planting and harvesting in September.

The murals  in Inakadate cover 15,000 square meters of paddy fields. 

From ground level, the designs are invisible, and viewers have to climb the mock castle tower of the village office to get a glimpse of the work.

Closer to the image, the careful placement of the thousands of rice plants in the paddy fields can be seen. 
 
Rice-paddy art was started  there in 1993 as a local revitalization project, an idea that grew from meetings of the village committees.  The different varieties of rice plants grow alongside each other to create  the masterpieces.

In the first nine years, the village office workers and local farmers grew a simple design of Mount  Iwaki every year. But their ideas grew more complicated and attracted more attention. 
 
In  2005, agreements between landowners allowed the creation of enormous  rice paddy art.

A year later, organizers used computers to precisely plot planting of the four differently colored rice varieties  that bring the images