Martin Luther King, Jr., on the eve of his assassination, eerily voiced a premonition of his death:

I’ve been to the mountain top!… He’s allowed me to go up the mountain! and I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land! I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight… that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!  And I’m happy tonight, I’m not worried about anything…. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

King, like Moses, never gets a chance to see the promised land. It’s both a truth and a metaphor. It’s a metaphor for leadership: There really is no leader beyond our own yearnings and dreams. While we  hope to rest in the illusion that there exists someone wiser, greater, or more powerful who can lead us, our fate is to become the wise woman or man we crave.

Is it even possible to  elect a leader, or a government that lives up to our ideals? Or, are our ideals ours to become? John Dewey predicted this when he said that, contrary to popular thought, the work of democracy was not to achieve common good and harmony, but was the work of individual self-realization. This is, as James Baldwin said, the real work of achieving our country.

Not an easy time we’re in. It’s one of the most polarized and angry political climates I’ve seen. I must confess to being pretty disheartened by the violent tone of political discourse. David Brooks wrote about it last week, putting the problem in historical perspective. He calls the current polarization a war, a government war, Big Government vs. Small Government. On one side are those who offer government as a solution, on the other, the small government, or even anti-government activists. It is a war reaching back to the earliest days of the country. (more…)

This past week I was in Yachats attending the Mindell‘s seminar, and pondering the question they were posing, what moves you? Writing about motivation, leadership and learning, we can begin to forget this question and think that I move myself. I decide. I lead. I determine a course of action, what strategies to take, what directions to pursue. But it’s not so simple. The “I” is not necessarily a unified thing. We each have multiple and conflicting parts, drives, desires, reactions, needs. (more…)

The last decade is a strong contender for the title “the decade of dubious leadership.” From the handling of Katrina to the collapse of the banking system, it was a disastrous decade for leadership. Ironically, it was also a decade during which more was written on leadership than ever before. I’m hoping for a better decade of leadership, and here are my top five leadership trends I’d like to see take off in the coming years. (more…)

My blog stats tell me that my most viewed post, by an extraordinary amount, is Power = force + distance/time. Don’t remember it? I barely do either. It’s a little “back soon” post I wrote during a busy period, feeling guilty for not having written much.

It’s ironic (and humbling) that the most read post isn’t anything related to my ideas. It’s popularity is due to the key words – power, force, distance – which comprise the physics formula for power and also the key to elite fitness, according to Crossfit, a strength and conditioning program whose popularity is exploding.

But it tempts me to try again and this time, make it meaningful to the topic of leadership and power. Jude Morton, a regular commenter here voiced what I too have been thinking since that post:

Outside of physics, all of these formulas seem applicable to psychological processes.

So let’s consider that. In physics, work is the transfer of energy to an object, and power is the rate at which work is done, so the faster you can transfer energy to an object, the more power you have. In sociology, there is no one formula for power or work, but a classic definition might be: the ability to influence your environment and get things done, often through others. (more…)