Organizational dysfunction surrounds us.
Corporations, companies, political bodies and groups, educational institutions, religious organizations, and social organizations all suffer, to one degree or another, from organizational dysfunction.
Why has organizational dysfunction become the norm instead of the exception to the rule? (more…)
Among the many legacies the past 20 or so years have left us as a society with, one of the most tragic, from a quintessential leadership perspective, is the widely-accepted and heartily-embraced death of the truth.
This death has occurred everywhere in our society: in our businesses, in our homes, in our schools, in our religious organizations, and in our local, state, and national governments.
Sadly, it is a death virtually no one has noticed – because it was a slow, subtle, creeping death – and virtually no one has mourned or is mourning. (more…)
If you haven’t read 1984 by George Orwell in a while, or if you’ve never read it at all, I strongly urge you to read it now.
Written almost 70 years ago, there is no novel – except perhaps Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel, Brave New World (which describes a completely different component of the world we live in today: illiterate, superficial, pursuing immediate gratification and a life devote to pleasure-seeking, eschewing knowledge, education, and thinking as dull and boring and unnecessary), which I see as a companion novel to 1984, even though they were written 17 years apart – that describes the world you and I now inhabit. (more…)
The Quintessential Leader stays away from discussing politics intentionally. That is because politics of any kind – governmental, social, religious, etc. – and quintessential leadership are incompatible. They do not and cannot coexist. Where you see politics, you see unquintessential leadership.
However, this blog does look at people who are involved in politics because quintessential or unquintessential leadership is demonstrated in who people are, what they think, say, and do. (more…)
The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century by David Reynolds
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Although the author’s style is dense – by that I mean lots of information packed into a tight, but multilevel structure that requires a certain kind of deep, concentrated reading/comprehension ability that I believe has tragically been completely lost except to all but a few of us in this technology-driven (entangled) age when our attention/comprehension spans have been diminished to mere skimming, at best, and no-context, 5-second, twisted, spun, and completely made-up out of thin air sound bites, at worst – this is an incredible and comprehensive look at the global legacy of World War I on the 20th century and, in fact, here today in the 21st century. (more…)
The Quintessential Leader 