From: Tom Whore (tomwhore@inetarena.com)
Date: Mon Aug 14 2000 - 11:36:22 PDT
On the thoughts of leadership..
Lead to what? This to me is one of the key questions that is so essential
to determining true leadership (ie that leadership i would either support
or advance by action)
A leader can lead to something or away from something. This is much the
same argument as Freedom From or Freedom To. Many leaders are great at
rushing onward into the breech while others seek to protect the status
quo.
Leaders can also go about these two things by going at it in a plethora of
differnt ways. Theres the slash and grab, the smilling buddah, the behinds
the back stabition, the proxy fruitfull, the coaltion miester.
Each holds value in a given time, each a merit for a given goal. When it
comes to leaders One Size does nto Fit all occasions.
So rather than look to a monotyping of leadership we should seek, perhaps,
the dynamicaly allocated leader of "these" goals.
To everything turn turn turn, there is a season turn turnturn.
The truly great leaders are those who can read thier timeframe and act to
the need. Winston Churchill was a diaster out of his time, but in the time
frame of Hitlers Menace he was brilliant. Hitler(godwins rules be damned)
was to the looser state of a defated germany a good leader. What he lead
them too ultimatley was horrible , but at that time and place to the
german people anything was better than being the Versailles Victims even
being the Villians In Victory.
Remeber the old adage..never bring a knife to a gun fight. So too with
leaders. Leaders are tools for society, they are that element which a
society uses to guide itself. Using a leader of passivity and shyness
would not benifit a society in a climate of agression and terror. Note
well that Ghandi resisted reather than give in. He did not become that
which his adversaries would want, rather he stood his ground.
Remeber Rule of Aquisition Number 76 "Every once in a while, declare
peace. It confuses the hell out of your enemies"
I think one of the ways the idea of leadership is so twisted these days is
the sway of the Monotheists. Compare the ideas of diveristy and
adaptation of Shintoists and Buddahism to those that adhere to the ONE
TRUISTS.
The multifaceted leader, the shape shifting opertunist at worst and the
"adapt to meet unthough of needs" at best leader is one that I think works
best.
Gates gets both too much and too little credit for where MS is today. A
lot of the reasons why MS is where they are today is the ClIAMTE of the
80's computer USER. Im not talking about the LISP hacker or the blooming
Stallmanite, im talking about the maasses of paying cumstomers who had to
jump from Multimate or Rod Perfect to Lotus or Framework or Jazz to
Paradox or dBase or RBase and back again just to get out simple
consolidated documents. they SCREAMED for someone to intergrate them all
under one interface and one unified paradigm. MS did that. They did it
well enough to advertise they were doing it, worked an OS around it and
sat back as peope thronged to them. When the throngs looked like they
might go elsewhere MS asseted what they were being lured away by and
either became that thing, bought that thing or destroyed that thing. The
unified one stop shopping goal was kept intact.
Gates' one driving reson for doing all this goes back even deeper
than a need to be the consumers best friend or to drive a market past
where anyone thought it would go...his drive was even more...basic.
Yes we can thank that one bad expericne with an early version of Basic for
world domination. When gates found his basic was being used by other
hobbysts in the 70s he swore a vow that he would make everyone use HIS
basic..and PAY FOR IT.
Low and behold here we stand with a flavor of basic IN EVERY GODN DAMN
WINDOWS PRODUCT.
His goal lead him here, and now its done. The questions becomes wether he
is a one trick pony or if he can retool his mania to another goal.
Like gates we need to look at what dirves other so called Leaders. Some
are driven by simple power lust (jobs, ellison, bush, gore) others by a
narrow goal (nader and consumer rights, gates and basic, ben and herry and
ice cream, foster brooks and beer). SOme seek to be the facilitators of
change and advance, some seek to gather and collect...
KNow your leaders. Where are they leading you?
Im leading myself to lunch.
[---===tomwhore@ []wsmf.org []inetarena.com []slack.net===---]
WSMF's web site ----http://wsmf.org
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