21st Century Leadership (#C21L) Development & Action Research - Staying Uncertain
What does it take to be a leader in these times; one who is managing to get some kind of purchase on the opportunities and complexities of the web, and the wider challenges of the 21st Century context?
Time may not exist, but we are still subject to its laws…
I tend to exist about half an hour behind wherever I want to be at a given time, or so one of my best friends once pointed out to me. Annoyingly, he is absolutely right.
Get The Only Truth Here!
Another day, another HBR article with a 5-step model to business success. God knows the author is probably trailing their current book, or even more of a professional foul these days: ‘the book I am currently writing’. (Aren’t we all?)
No More Handouts!
I sat in the café opposite the conference venue with a friend I had just made. We drank our cappuccinos and lamented with each other:
“When are we ever going to hear anything new? I mean everyone speaking at the Conference is bright, friendly, interesting… and on paper what they are offering seems sensible. But it doesn’t really address what I face in my organisation.
We are The Others
I have participated in the story of Stephen Lawrence in three ways. Firstly I was involved in Diversity Development at the Metropolitan Police between 2001 and 2006.
Splash!
Splash! The first few strokes are slippery smooth as I glide under the water. Sometimes I try to swim the first length without surfacing, but this can make the next stage feel worse: the dreaded second and third lengths. These are the stiff ones. The change of state from land to water literally drags on my limbs, and I feel out of place, a fish out of water in the water.
And God laughs…
I have to confess to being something of a petrol head. I love internal combustion engines in all their forms, along with the vehicles they power. So how can it be that in the last three months, I have gone from owning two cars to being on the point of owning no cars? What kind of epiphany can have produced such a change of heart?
Love and do what you like
‘There’s so little content we don’t know how we got it through’, screams the headline of the Daily Telegraph (9/12/11). This story is about how an exam board insider is blowing the whistle on the poor quality of learning at GCSE level. The lack of content, we are to believe, is regarded as a bad thing, a scary thought that our children may not be being tested hard enough, or that they might not know important ‘facts’.
It’s the relationship, Stupid!
Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, is a clever man. You expect him to be. It seems that those who drop out of Harvard to pursue an entrepreneurial career may be more clever than those who stay on.
It’s only a game…
I like football. I know it isn’t cool, but then again neither is Rugby anymore, so that’s OK. I play five-a side football regularly (a sad sight) and most weekends during the Season, I watch a lot football from the sofa.
