We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of expertise. What we don’t have are leaders.
What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision. via www.theamericanscholar.org
Bam!
Beautiful post. Read it in its entirety.
Then ask yourself, ourselves:
- do our organizations lack thinkers?
- do we discourage thinkers in our organization? Those are the ones who ask questions, show interest, seek to understand if what we do is worth its doing?
- do we sacrifice our abilities to think as we move through grade schools and into our careers?
- does our organization, shoot, even our economy reflect our unwillingness to think, to ask is what we do worth doing?
Think about it. Ok, that's kinda cheeky to write. On the other hand, it is a journey of a thousand miles and today we could take our first steps. And being readers of this blog and others, you likely already have.
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