Describe a specific situation in which a leader might be effective without anticipating future problems. Discuss what you think determines whether or not it is necessary for a leader to anticipate future problems.
In general, an organization, just like an organism, must consistently and accurately predict upcoming opportunity and imminent danger in order to thrive. A leader operating an organization must wear a variety of hats: chief executive, visionary, stakeholder/shareholder advocate and customer advocate. Most leaders can only operate in one or two roles successfully at once, and need a larger executive team to balance out chief executive bias. A given leader may be a consummate consumer advocate and awe-inspiring chief executive, but give away slack as a visionary and shareholder advocate.
When a leader is one part of a super-organism that elsewhere employs a visionary who anticipates future problems for the organization, and a stakeholder advocate willing to go to battle on behalf of a core audience, it may be possible for that leader to remain effective without forecasting a roadmap beyond the financial quarter, at the scope of a single mature circulatory (or financial) unit.
But when a leader is made responsible for an early-stage venture, or for making the firm’s future hold firm, then just as in the natural world, there is no avoiding the responsibility of threat, catastrophe and succession planning. The aim is to ensure that the super-organism may live, even through catastrophic loss of time, treasure and talent. Metabolic activities (consumption, digestion and excretion) that rely on short-sighted foraging habits (insufficient customer development, overlong sales cycles) must be remodeled and refactored to operate within the bounds of a sometimes brutal ecosphere, lest the body mass and metabolic rate of the firm be too great or small or fragile to weather the next major storm. The leader must guarantee that the super-organism thrives and survives through thick and thin, by assuring that the vital capacity of visionary is operating near enough to the chief executive such that the resources of the chief executive are “on call” in the event of a looming catastrophe.
Describe a specific situation in which human behavior might not be guided primarily by self-interest. Discuss what you think determines when human behavior is guided primarily by self-interest and when it is not.
If I am not for me, then who will be? A question asked by Rabbi Hillel years ago resounds to this day. Self-assertion is a survival imperative. In a state of feast or famine, we must call out for company to improve upon opportunity (whether meager or abundant) and evade starvation and worse. In that sense, self-interest motivates self-care and acts as a fundamental and final guarantee that the basic needs of all members of a community are met.
Yet if the proximate cause of human behavior is self-interest, the primary cause—the overarching cause that leads to sustained effort—is the enlightened interest. Few are so solitary as to make their decisions primarily for their own narrow good. Service and sacrifice each require self-abnegation, a willful choice to set aside our own needs for a time so that those whose needs are greater may find succor in our communal relation. We as human beings draw our sense of place and meaning from our service and sacrifice to larger communities, starting with the family and extending outward in ever greater circles of empathy. The most obvious case is of a father, a mother and a child. The mother and father sacrifice sleep and sanity to raise a youth to adulthood. For their sacrifice, the parents gain membership into an unbroken chain of descent and inheritance that every ancestor to date had devoted themselves to guarding. Life itself is a debt to generations past and generations-to-come.
The degree to which the primacy of decision-making rests on self-interest and self-assertion alone is a function of the size of a woman’s and man’s soul. Empathic self-extension into a greater community can extend the soul, leading to a deep devotion to the enlightened interest, whether as a subcomponent or superset of self-care.
Describe a specific situation in which leadership might involve keeping silent. Discuss what you think determines whether a leader should speak out or keep silent.
Like any technology, the technology of natural language is both creative and destructive. Speech can heal or harm. A leader must strike a balance between disclosure (ethics) and nondisclosure (aesthetics).
Cautious discretion is advised when human or organizational dignity are on the line. The burdens of office include expectations on the rightful usage of speech to achieve organizational and personal aims. The power to speak from a position of leadership has its source in liberty, not license.
It is not enough to obey the letter of privacy laws. My university enshrines this lesson in its motto, “Leges sine moribus vanae” (Laws without morals [moral taste] are vain). Compassionate leadership demands the use of speech to shape and synchronize the taste, and thereby the norms and code of conduct, within an organization.
Keeping silent is not an option when conscientious respect for the rights of others or oneself demands disclosure. When the defense of human dignity runs against the requirements of the organization, an empathic leader must defend beings from non-beings, and treat all beings as equally deserving of dignity. This involves goal- and standard setting and feedback design that measure the value of the organization through the promotion of human dignity, and not the value of human dignity through the promotion of the organization.
Describe a specific situation in which citizens in a democracy might justifiably not be dependent upon one another. Discuss what you think determines when citizens in a democracy should be dependent upon one another.
Let’s distinguish positive and negative rights. Positive right applies in situations where a citizen carries the expectation that another member of the public will come to their aid in a time of need. A negative right is the right to non-interference, the liberty to engage in a course of conduct without other agents influencing the planned trajectory.
A citizen of Switzerland expects to be absolved by the body politic of the onerous financial cost of an adverse medical event. Swiss citizens are protected by positive right from ineluctable medical bankruptcy.
In the United States, a property-owner has exclusive rights over the use of their plot of land. The federal government cannot confiscate an apartment property, even in the extreme case of building condemnation, without paying a fair price for the land that apartment lies upon through the invocation of eminent domain. What’s more, to invoke eminent domain, the government must satisfy a clear and convincing standard of evidence indicating that the plot is critical to the wellbeing or security of the community. Property owners are protected from government predation by a negative right.
What determines the right balance of positive and negative citizenship? In a representative democracy, citizens make use of the majority, or a super-majority, as the first-line of decision-making. We rely on the courts to protect the minority from a tyrannical majority, by constructing quora (juries) that may counterbalance the abuses of the reigning government or tyrannical majority in favor of the vulnerable minority or conscientious individual. At bottom, we are all ultimately dependent upon one another in a democracy, by way of the legal-legislative-juridical system, to act as and to act upon the voice of individual and collective conscience in the defense of our expectations for and against the interference of others in our vital trajectories.
Describe a specific situation in which the object of education might be teaching values rather than skills. Discuss what you think determines when the object of education is to teach skills and when it is to teach values.
It is often said that those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Consider Holocaust education. The explicit aim of building awareness of the Holocaust is to ensure that another genocide of the Jews shall “never again” occur. If we privilege cultural sensitivity as a skill, then Holocaust educators reinforce cultural sensitivity, inhibit pathologic anti-semitism, and promote a preference for Jewish nationalism, while leaving attentive museum-goers with a universal narrative that describes the course of genocide, such that they can recognize and oppose the emotional stampedes that lead populations toward genocide.
As for technical education, in the course of a master teaching a skill to a pupil, the values that undergird the master’s craft will diffuse, or undergo active transport, to the pupil. Skill-building is inseparable from the development and refinement of moral taste, for all education unavoidably affects students’ orientation to and pursuit of truth, goodness, beauty, nobility and happiness. How can a potter instruct a student in her art, without relaying criteria for the assessment and determination of excellence? Values are coincident and coeval with craft, for women and men, boys and girls love that which they make or do. Since time immemorial, moneymakers loved money, dancers dance, and potters pots. Nowhere else is this more evident than in the pupil’s choice of how to spend their time, both at work and at leisure.
The resolution above (“The object of education should be to teach skills, not values”) presents a false dichotomy, and a false schism, between skills and values, because skills entail values and values entail skills. Education should teach skills by influencing and reinforcing the values of their craft, while embedding the craft’s values in students in the course of student skill development. This holds true whether the skills we value (or the values we enskill) are genocide avoidance and recognition or tissue healing and engineering.
Each night, I’m going to select a writing sample prompt, set an egg timer for 30 minutes, and write until time runs out. I’ll immediately post whatever I’ve written, however unfinished, incomplete or incoherent.
For the last few years, I’ve stopped publishing my writing, in part because I fear that I will be held responsible in adulthood for what I write while a young adult.
I’d like to find my voice again. I’ll be experimenting with rapid drafting techniques. Give me some space to play with thought and feeling, and modes of production.
These writing samples will expire three years after they’re published. I’ll think and feel differently by 2015, and even more differently by 2020 and 2030.
Although the internet economy and expertise development are fueled by deliberate practice, mankind does not have a universal, sexy currency symbol to tally the 10,000 hours required to become a deeply experienced domain expert. The time symbol (t) used in physics and chemistry courses just doesn’t cut it. How can the lowly letter t gain ground on the unmistakable, almighty dollar ($)? The letter t has too many other responsibilities to be chosen as the the proxy currency symbol for intense focus. The currency unit for focus and time could use a makeover.
Why not use a pictogram to represent units of attention? I’d like to propose the use and adoption of ‘⇲’ as the universal code for human attention. The symbol comprises a single, nose-down arrow ploughing its way forward. And just as the dollar is abbreviated as USD (United States Dollar), attention can be abbreviated as ATTN.
Here’s an example of how I’m using the ATTN sign to track my weekend practice hours.
Last weekend I made ⇲16 total, so ⇲22.5 is a marked 40% increase in applied focus. From here, it’s a simple matter to imagine deploying the tools of financial analysis to your attention. Imagine creating the following each year:
Time balance sheet
Time income/outcome statement
Statement of retained time
Statement of time flows
But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, try denominating your attention for a few days, using paper and pencil to mark your daily ⇲ income and ⇲ outcome. Are you receiving a strong return on invested attention? How much of your attention is bartered one-on-one? How much ⇲ is devoted to developing your community? How much community ⇲ is devoted to developing you?
Availability
The ⇲ sign is already widely available on all modern word processors that support Unicode*, including Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, Pages and Google Docs. You can begin using it for personal use immediately; it’s easy and fast to draw, and the symbol is already available in your favorite software packages.
To see this currency gain steam, a first step may be to pitch the Microsoft Word development team to include ⇲ within the special currency symbol set, with an appropriate descriptor.
Finally, for those with a technical bent, the ⇲ can be found as Unicode character U+21F2.
We’ve wiped the slate clean, since Checklist Life is coming under shared management. Expect a new post once each week. The first substantive post will arrive no later than Sunday, September 19, 2010.
