Out of Context: Great Followership Is Harder Than Leadership

"It’s no surprise that books on leadership, promising to revel the secrets of countless football coaches and historical figures as disparate as Moses and Attila the Hun, outnumber those on followership several thousand to one. After all, leadership is the prize that ambitious men and women have struggled and even died for at least since Alexander the Great. Whether the field is politics, business, science, or the arts, leaders are at the center of the action, the envied if not enviable stars whose lives seem to burn a little brighter than our own. We aspire to their power and its perquisites even as we take unseemly pleasure when one of them stumbles and falls. Indeed, the moment when each of us realizes he or she is mostly a follower, not a leader, is a genuine developmental milestone; who forgets that painful leap over the line of demarcation between the boundless fantasies of childhood and the sober reality of an adulthood in which we will never quite become the god we hoped to be?"

Posted by Michael McKinney at 06:50 AM
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Out of Context: Work-Family Conflict

"There is no such thing as a firewall between personal issues and work productivity. That’s because we can't have two brains we can interchange depending on whether we are in our office or in our bedroom. Stress in the workplace affects family life, causing more stress in the family. More stress in the family causes more stress at work, which in turn gets brought home again. It’s a deadly, self-feeding spiral, and researchers call it “work-family conflict.” So you may have the most wonderful feelings about autonomy at work, and you may have tremendous problem-solving opportunities with your colleagues. But if your home life is a wreck, you can still suffer the negative effects of stress, and so can your employer."

Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:32 AM
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Out of Context: Gaius Petronius Arbiter on Reorganizing

"We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized…. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization."

Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:10 AM
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Out of Context: Managing Paradox

The more turbulent the times, the more complex the world, the more paradoxes there are. We can and should, reduce the starkness of some of the contradictions, minimize the inconsistencies, understand the puzzles in the paradoxes, but we cannot make them disappear, or solve them completely, or escape from them.

Paradox has to be accepted, coped with, and made sense of, in life, in work, in the community, and among nations.

We have no chance of managing the paradoxes if we are not prepared to give up something, if we are not willing to bet on the future, and if we cannot find it in ourselves to take a risk with people. These are our pathways through the paradoxes if we have the will. The pursuit of our own short-term advantage, and the desire to win everything we can, will only perpetuate animosities, destroy alliances and partnerships, frustrate progress, and breed lawyers and the enforcement bureaucracy.

Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:05 AM
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Out of Context: Excellence

Excellence, for example, stands for giving our best, on the field of play or in the professional arena. Our motto is “faster, higher, stronger.” Excellence is not just about winning. It is also about a state of mind and a behavior. Making progress against personal goals. Striving to be and do our best in our daily lives. It is about benefiting from the healthy combination of a strong body, mind and will.

Posted by Michael McKinney at 11:29 AM
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Out of Context: A Matter of Character

"The issues that provoked the present crisis were not overly subtle. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, and CEOs do not need a business ethicist to tell them right from wrong. What they need is the character to do the right thing, which is to say, the mettle to avoid the temptation to talk themselves out of their knowledge of right and wrong even if that knowledge lowers their profit margins."

Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:02 AM
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Out of Context: Information Overload

“Everyone spoke of an information overload, but what there was in fact was a non-information overload.”

Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:44 AM
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Out of Context: Democracy

“The people are always said to know best. But the fact that democracies do not like sacrifices, do not listen to bad news nor wish to think about bad possibilities in the future, do not want their comfort or profits interfered with, should be accepted with apprehension, not complacence. Why is it evident that democracy and liberal values will prevail? The evidence is very limited, the historical experience with modern democracy brief, of a little more than two centuries. We do not know the future of democracy."

Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:56 AM
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Out of Context: Self-Gratification

“A society in which self-gratification is the norm is also a society in which there are no longer any criteria for making moral judgments. One feels entitled to have what one wants, whether or not one is worthy. Thus, moral judgments become dispensable. There is no need to differentiate between ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’

Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:01 AM
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Out of Context: Everyone is a Leader

• "Leadership is how you interact with everyone, including yourself. Leaders are quite visible within large and small business. We tend to think of them as business owners, CEO, and managers at all levels. Traditionally, leadership also extends into politics and other global affairs. However, parents, therapists and health care providers, solopreneurs, sport coaches, consultants, mentors, partners in relationship, teachers, authors, and others who interact with people on a regular basis are all leaders. Everyone is a leader either by choice or default.

"If you don’t think of yourself as a leader, then you’re limited in your thinking. Leading is the way we help move people into action, including ourselves. The question is not whether you are a leader, but how well you lead."

Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:18 AM
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Out of Context: Quotes on the Art of Leadership

• "Businesses need to change their thinking about leadership as the pinnacle of success for everyone and stop doling out leadership jobs as rewards for people who perform very well but simply are not leaders."

Posted by Michael McKinney at 01:30 PM
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Out of Context: Quotes on the Art of Leadership

• "Jealousy and envy are often about comparing our insides to someone else's outsides—a symptom of our externally focused world."

• "The ability to think better will soon become the most significant competative advantage companies and individuals can claim. Thinking better is what it's all about."

Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:52 AM
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Out of Context: Gary Hamel on the Post-Managerial Society

“We have for many decades been living in a “post-industrial” society. I believe we are now on the verge of a “post-managerial” society, perhaps even a “post-organizational” society. Before you start hyper-ventilating, let me assure you that this doesn’t mean a future without managers. Just as the coming of the knowledge economy didn’t herald the death of heavy industry, a “post-managerial” economy won’t be entirely free of executives, supervisors, administrators and overseers. But it does imply a future in which the “work of management” is less and less the responsibility of “managers.” To be sure, activities will still need to be coordinated, individual efforts aligned, relationships nurtured, objectives decided upon, and knowledge disseminated. But increasingly, this work will be distributed out to those on the periphery.”

Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:10 AM
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