The concept of leadership in the 21st Century needs to be consistent with the type of society that is emerging. The most significant changes in leadership reflect the transformations that are occurring in society-a society that is evolving from structure of hierarchies, standard answers and predictability, to one that is based on interlocking networks, multiple outcomes, and a comfort with ambiguity and uncertainty. Of most importance, society will be constantly changing, interactive, interdependent and increasingly complex.
A key challenge in today’s world of constant change is to realize that traditional concepts and methods, while appropriate for current projects that have defined outcomes, are often counterproductive for the kind of transformational capacity building that will be necessary for the future vitality of communities. 21st century leadership will take will require more than just shifting from tasks to processes, or from linear thinking to systemic thinking. It will require rethinking the very nature of the overall leadership experience.
The concept of 21st century community and organizational transformation recognizes that there will be times when traditional leadership ideas are appropriate and times when new leadership ideas will to need to be used.
The following chart compares attributes of traditional leadership and transformative leadership. Each person and group will need to develop the judgment to choose which needs to be emphasized based on each situation and overall long-term goal of the organization and community.
| Traditional Builder | Master Capacity Builder | |
|---|---|---|
| Short-term situation | Takes immediate action | Considers the long-term effect |
| Long-term issue | Predicts a specific outcome with predetermined accountability | Anticipates what may emerge using trends and weak signals |
| Concept of Planning | Strategic planning and linear | Adaptive planning and non-linear |
| Concept of Structure | Focuses on standards | Emphasizes alternatives, feedback and networks |
| Concept of Thinking | Focuses on absolute answers and singular truths | Emphasizes being open to new ideas and choices |
| Focus | Concerned for how action impacts the leader | Concern for how action impacts the situation and others |
| Use of Brain | Emphasizes left brain | Emphasizes integration of right and left brain |
| Emotional Attributes | Emphasizes action, being right, strong opinions | Emphasizes patience, caring, openness to new ideas |
| Ethics | Concern for “the” truth | Concern for truth(s) |
| Concept of the individual | Independent and self-sufficient | Inter-dependent and self-reliant |
| Concept of others | Compares to one’s existing beliefs | Embraces diversity and openness of thinking |
This post originally appeared on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/pulse/you-traditional-transformational-leader-both-neil-richardson.
Neil Richardson, what you need to understand, as an alleged leadrship guru, is that there is your version of leadership based on 3rd Wave High Performance and there is the US Army Ranger School leadership model, which Terry Collins and I employed to put the process in motion that created the PAC Rugdy national championship. Everybody at SUD was bought into Ken Green’s vison of producing test level rugby players in the Good Ol’ US of A just like the teams he played for in Argentina back in his day. My role, as the resident 5th Wave High Performance guru, was to make that happen. It did As far as I know, I am the last Sud skipper to win a tournament in the fall of 1975. I might have the timing off, but Terry can tell you. He was my Sherman to my Grant before Vicksburg. I don’t know if he understoos what I was doing, but he was my 6 until we both more less left active participation in the Sud community. Sud was my first Learning Community I can point a finger at and say “This is how it works. I’s fun and easy to do.
The community is a capitaist tool AS EXISTS the first time I look at it.
What this appointment of Mulvaney means is that the big money behind Trump want to recreate the economic conditions leading up to the 2008 mortgage crises. These people what America to blow so they can pick the pieces like they did with the Resolution Trust Corporation. In terms of the dynamical processes of 5th Wave High Performance, the Resolution was a direct result of Bob Dole’s 1986 Tax Reform. What they did was to remove a bunch of tax shelters that evolved beginning with Nixon’s domestic program into the sort of Yupped Liberation Front vaction tax shelters like White Water that was drinving the economic recovery of America from Stagflation and blew up several strata of wealth I associate with Nixon’s Affirmation Action agenda, including properties associated with S&Ls that had done a lot fo Junk Bond financing to support the growth of the Yuppie Liberation Front’s rising afluence associated with the New Deal and Democrat Party. You remember that constant stream of investigatons into White Water by the Conservatives, the basis for the Crooked Hillary narrative? This was collateral damage from Bob Dole’s 1986 Tax Reform. The Resolution Trust Corptoration was the strategic goal of the legislative design. The outcome was the largest transfer of wealth from the American middle class to basically the class of Olligarch’s associated with the Koch brothers and Jeff Bezos flogging Trump for Paul Ryan’s Ayn Rand inspired Tax Reform.
These poeple want to bow up the country, some because they are anarchists like Bannon and Newtie who like to watch things burn, like the arsonist in The Stand, but most, like the Koch brothers and Jeff Bezon, just want to privatize America because they are really smart guys, like you, the smarest guys in the room, like Enron, but greed has made them stupid.
Whatever it is that informs your attitude about greek letter fraternaties is what makes you stupd, It’s a characteristic of 3rd Wave High Performance. Moral compromise elevated to high principle.
Now, when I took over as skipper in the spring of 1975, Sud was one of the top Rugby clubs in America in terms of tactical elegance and strategic efficacy. Our culture was based on attracting players at the leading edge of test level capacities on a walk-about of some sort and put on entertaining rugby while constantly training Americans by immersion on state-of-the-art international play. I was fortunate to be a part of that dynamic at the A-Level before I became skipper, and, in different circumstances, I never would have considered become captain, but we were at a crises of sustainabiity that could have stalled, if not killed, the achievement of Ken Green’s vision for ever.
The crises was that we relied far too heavily on John Muir’s foot to humilate our rivals with hair-breadth escapes and near disaster, We could keep the game close with the most physical, and athletic teams west of the Mississippi with our supeior understand of Rugby and it’s Laws and draw them into a fatal error which gave John a shot at goal from practically aware in the same ZIP CODE as the uprights and watch the Washington assholes wilt in the face of a superior moral truth.
But, after a series of brillian seasons, our sail began to luft and not real headway towards Ken Green’s vision for a SUD National Champion faded. I had played on a championship rugby team my freshman and sophomore year at Indiana and watched that focus drain awary my junior and senior year. I played with an All American, Art Stump, and with a Green Beret bootstraping a masters degree and I absorbed those quailities as performance metrics I continue to apply. Dynamical metrics. And what had happened at IU was happening at SUD and I was seriously concerned and I campaigned to be come club captain and got the job and won the tournament which was the result of the transformation process I put the SUD community through to install 5th Wave High Performance, Not to put to fine a pont on it, but I developed the club’s operational performance the same way I did my platoon in Vietnam, with the help of Terry and a British Army officer who voluteered his time coarch us. I built on the existing of the club, which was exemplified by the attitudes of Kent and Trish Daniels, Peace Corps veterans from a tour in Kenya and their sort of White Mischief savoir faire, but in a stew of a totally cosmopolitan community. It was a time of a moveable feast.
Now, it took a long time for that National Champion to emerge as the fulfillment of Ken Green’s vision, but it has and it was as result of a deliberate process I set in motion. After we won that tournament, I began to search for my replacement, We had the advantage of the Bottom Line as an international destination for expatriate ruggers looking for a warm hearth and conivivial society and the entire social calendar was basically a continuous focus on recruiting and you can ask Terry how that worked out. It was a wonderful time, But I knew I had to leave because I had not vision on how to build the corporate aspect of the club and, when Quinton Lawson finally arrived, I was able to get out of the way, There was an element in the club that wanted me to move a whole lot faster than I did, but I left when the future of Ken Green’s vision was a assured by competent stewardship and Quentin Lawson was that man, I asked him to stand as my best man so that some day I could explain why he was part of my wedding. So I could help you become a serious leadership guru instead of a captive member of the Yuppy Liberation Front and an unintended co-conspirator with Steve Bannon and Mike Mulvaney.
Putin had nothing to do with the election hacking. If you agree with Hillary Clinton’s assessment of Putin, you are part of the problem and the other side of the same cultural warfare bullshit that began between the SDS and YAF and continues with Trump voters and the Yuppy Liberation Front coalition of the Democrat party who voted for Adrian Fenty’s gentrificaion agenda. It’s something of a package deal. Fenty’s agenda was a liberal version of privatization.
I also began to curtail my rugby in order to continue to assemble Plan B after being scare out of PLan A (a military career) by a crypto-Nazi up my chain of command in Vietnam. Plan A was to make my bones in Vietnam, marry my college sweet heart and retire as the Commanding General of Tradoc and watch the hurricanes come across Cape Fear from the picture window on the second floor of the Commanding General’s quarters at Ft. Monroe,
Plan B was to get filthy rich and marry my college sweet heart, To this end, I began working on the Soviet airplane deal November 1975 and I was being purely on the come by 1977, when Terry raised $150 to keep my out of jail on the sidelines of a C Side Sud game, Terry can tell you about it, I was living in my offices in Dulles and the Soviet airplne deal, the X-Avia Project, was my path to getting filthy rich and marrying my college sweet heart and becoming even richer by doing lots of business deals witht the Soviet economy like Armand Hammer.
I was working at the leading edge of the Nixon-Brezhnev initiatives and Nixon’s domestic program. Because of their hatred of Nixon, similar to your hatred of fraternities, Democrats, with the exception of Stuart Eizenstadt, have never understood Nixon’s domestic program and, consequently, have bought into Reaganomics more or less whole cloth, which is why Fenty’s gentrification agenda attacked affordable housing: you didn’t know any better. Democrats were out of ideas when they let Reagan beat Carter (and Trump beat Clinton) and Reagan seemed to be good for their new wealth. Nixon’s domestic program was based on implementing Eisenhower’s 1956 Presidential Platform and Eisenhower’s 1956 Presidential Platform was an validation of, and a double-down on, the New Deal. Stuart Eisenstadt understood this and was making Nixon’s domestic program work and an essential element of that program was a gentrification model based on the complete continuium of housing, which Muriel Bowser finally embraced as the theme of her administration, and not the truncated Trump version of gentrification employed by Fenty and his Yuppy Liberation Front warriors.
You see, I worked for Elizabeth Falcon’s Housing for All campaign, which restored the original intent of gentrification through her determination to capitalize the Housing Production Trust Fund with $100 million commitment for affordable housing, I live in a building with long-term financing from the Housing Production Trust Fund as a direct result of the Housing for All campaign, I testified before Bowser’s economic committee when she was running for mayor. I didn’t vote for her or Fenty, but it was nothing personal and she is doing the right thing in terms of the corruption of the original intent of Nixon’s gentrification. If we hadn’t gotten that financing through the TOPA process, the house would now be either a Air B&B for the Yuppy Liberatin Front Sharing Economy or very expensive condo’s for young, upperwardly mobile members of the Yuppy Liberation Front farm team. Without that room, I am a homeless veteran.
Which is why you need to understand, as an alleged leadership guru for the Yuppy Liberation Front that there is your verion of 3rd Wave High Peformance leadership and the 5th Wave High Performance leadership model of the US Army Ranger School . You aren’t broken, but badly oriented, which is easy to fix. I’ve sent you The Leadership Secrets of 5th Wave High Performance. We can do for America what I did for Sud American de Rugby in 1975. Ask Terry Collins what he remembers.
But, here’s the larger thing, the first thing Democrats, including Hillary, need to do is recalibrate their understanding of Putin’s agenda. American needs to take his “Sovereign Democracy” agenda seriously. We were working at the leading edge of what has become Sovereign Democracy with the X-Avia Project in 1975. Armand Hammer led the way on that, to some degree, but George Soros was doing similar work in the Warsaw pact countries, espeically Hungary, at the same time. Vietnam had completely crippled the Soviet economy: if your business model is based on conquest and plunder, but the conquest fails and there is no plunder to cover even the cost of the investment in conquest, you’re fucked. That’s what Nixon and Brezhnev were trying to fix and Putin is still working on the problem
What Ken Burns Vietnam (as an example of the Oliver Stone version of Vietnam) is that, when the military was talking about a war of attrition, it had nothing to do with body counts. That was Hanoi’s decision: uncountable cost. Vietnam was a battle in the larger Cold War and the war of attrition was against the Soviet economy. We lost Vietnam, fair and square, but achieved a win-win when Gorbachev pulled the plug on Marxism. The problem is, because Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, agree with Hillary Clinton about Putin, we are losing the war against the Deep Agenda backing Trump and proposing Tax Reform in order to put Reaganomics on steroids. For the Soviet Union, Vietnam was like the battle of Borodino for Napoleon: it was a battle he coudn’t afford to fight and a battle he couldn’t afford to lose. We fought, we lost, no more Soviet Union.
Now, that’s not a popular opinion about Vietnam amoung the Yuppy Liberation Front.
Anyway, the people who control the selections for the American Eagles Rugby Team employ the same 3rd Wave High Performance model you use, This was a problem with American rugby in 1975: it was dominated by draft dodgers who selected people to play test matches based on their ideas of what transcendent performance required. I protested against the staus quo selectors as skipper by asking three players, John Muir, Art Weber and Mike Green, to not play on the Potomac select side because the politics of the PRU was producing inferior rugby and that continues to bubble up to the Eagles, who are slowly becoming a credible test competitor. If I could have been a player/coach at that point in the same way I was at SUD, the All Blacks would becoming to America to challenge the Eagles for possession of the World Cup. That’s the difference between your model of leadership and mine.
And, as you come to see this, the fraud of Reaganomics will become evident> Muriel Bower is headed in the right direction with the Housing for All version of gentrification, which is an element of the economics of Jesus as defined by Mark 9:37. It’s a paradigm shift that will crush Trump and all he represents.
And it will begin to spill over into Putin’s Sovereign Democracy in constructuve ways far more efficacious than the current carrot-and-stick approach of sanctions.
Just ask Terry Collins.
Thanks…there is a lot here, we’ll need to unpack and take a look at. Thank you.