Dave Fleming offers some great insights in a recent article in REV Magazine. I found the following offering a good grasp of the mire leadership may become …
Know-it-all leaders have little tolerance for the past or their predecessors. To them the past represents stale ideas and practices. Wrong. Of course good leaders need to be forward thinkers. In their book, The Leadership Challenge (Jossey-Bass), James Kouzes and Barry Posner put it, ?Leaders need to be proactive in thinking about the future…? And I agree. Yet the domain of the leader and the diet of the leader are two very different things. An overly futuristic leader?s diet can easily overlook the wisdom of predecessors.
In the domain of leadership, it?s easy to believe that only current information is credible information. Yet as we?ve seen in the last decade or so, some of the freshest and most-needed insights (for the emerging culture) are ancient in origin. Yes, we need fresh voices to blaze new information trails. But we should be careful not to dismiss the wisdom of the past. When we ignore the past, we relegate leadership to the surface of cultural change rather than to the domain of human experience that transcends epochs and eras. What?s needed is an eye for a future that?s hidden in the past. Part of what a leader will need in the years ahead will come as much from recovery as discovery.
