Category: Personal Reflections and Diary

THE COST OF OUR ENDEAVOR

I think radicalism, revolution, and pursuit of renaissance is personally costly for leadership. I’m a career executive entrepreneur who built my fortunes – starting in my early twenties – by acquisition and integration of companies consisting of people with different levels of education and experience. It is easier for me to see the world paternally rather than parentally, and managerially rather than interpersonally. And even more so militarily and politically rather than socially and familial.

Within the spectrum of Political, Executive, Paternal, Parental, or Peerage relationships, our ‘reward’ – feedback – for our leadership varies across a big difference in not only people but time – and our frustration or self doubt must be held in check by our confidence in a field of mixed successes and failures over time.

Because we wish to measure the change in individuals – rather than the social construction of organizational change that occurs through the fragmentary understanding of ever increasing numbers until they system (market) of people itself is self-correcting because there are sufficient fragments among people with partial knowledge and variation in ability that they collectively coalesce over time into emergent fundamental rules of concept, thought, paradigm, argument, and behavior without the reinforcement of the underlying understanding.

I think some of us don’t have the stomach for ‘crossing the chasm’ into hostile territory: where we increasingly encounter people with increasingly greater differences in intuitions, understandings and wants. I think each of us needs to continue to discover whether we are supporter, activist, supplier, fighter, leader, and whether we educate as co-operator and ally, advisor and peer, a teacher and parent, a paternal executive, or a general for whom sacrifices – including of those we value – are the costs of winning wars for those whom we may not – but who have no other advocates. And given the spectrum of our current conditions we may not be in a personal position to choose our preference from the full range of choices available.

But this is the stage we are at. Where we have a solution, there is market demand for it, and we must migrate from parents and small business owners to ‘industry leaders’ before we next migrate to politicians and generals. For some of us the cost of making a mark on history is worth paying. For others it is not. We can only make mark that we are willing and able to. But every mark adds to the whole.

The only people who matter are those willing and able. The only people who matter at the beginning at first are those who fight, those who assist those who fight, and those who do not resist them. The rest are not important until they must be governed. But they are the ones who talk the most – generating demand for rule by those willing.