KEY POINTS FROM THE VIDEO
“The Legacy Crisis”
Leadership is always about more than what’s happening now; it must also be concerned with creating the future.
But most leaders are notoriously shortsighted.
To fix this, counterintuitively, we begin to recognize that leadership is always more about what we leave behind (our legacy) than what we actually see happening in the moment.
Leadership Is Not For You
Leadership is for those that follow you.
Without followers you are not a leader; you’re just an explorer.
The 4 Things Followers Need
(Please buy the fabulous Strengths Based Leadership by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie to learn more about the last 4 ideas.)
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A few days ago, the headline of the Huffington Post read “SMOKE MONSTER,” bolstered by dramatic pictures of the Iceland Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption. I showed my wife the lovely animation (below) of how the cloud spread across Europe in a matter of days, to which she remarked,
“Good thing we’re not traveling there right now… or is it!?”
It took me a moment, but I quickly realized exactly what she meant.
Being “stuck” in Amsterdam or Prague a few more days doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.
Last week in the Phoenix airport I saw the latest footage of the havoc volcanic residue is having on European travel, showing travelers stranded everywhere and fed by the caption: “Making the best of a bad situation.”
But it’s all about perspective, isn’t it?
Many of our life situations aren’t really good or bad; we assign those values ourselves.
Makes me wonder if we can adopt that approach in other areas of our lives. Maybe unemployment becomes an opportunity to finish the book idea that’s been rattling around. Maybe a job interview becomes an opportunity to learn something new about a company. Maybe the eruption of a volcano gives us a good excuse to enjoy a few more days in an amazing foreign city.
I know this doesn’t work for everything, but I also know I could probably use this technique and adjust my perspective a lot more than I currently do.
P.S. More incredible Eyjafjallajökull pictures here.
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Jargon is everywhere. Just like countries, every industry has its own language with terminology, slang, and catch phrases. Some of this is fine, maybe even good — it can help people within the tribe connect to each other and speak more quickly and accurately about things.
But in many groups these days, we have gone ridiculously overboard with our jargon, to the point where it is not helping anything, especially not our communication.
Take my field of Organizational Development / Human Resources (OD/HR), for example. Here’s a list of jargon I pulled from an email I received today:
All from one email.
Here’s the problem: outside of my field (hell, even INSIDE my field in many cases), to many folks this would be meaningless gibberish. And even for those “in the know,” my question is… does it have to be so complicated? Why can’t we just say what we need to without hiding behind a bunch of terminology?
Personally, too much jargon makes me wonder if folks really know what they’re even talking about.
As boundaries between industries continue to break down in the new economy, internal vocabularies across the board need to be simplified.
Take the iPad. Releasing this coming Saturday, this is a device that will obliterate even more barriers between technology and the news industry, and unlike the Kindle, also incorporates elements of traditional business (word processing) and entertainment (movie viewing and music listening) capability as well.
You’ll notice Apple NEVER uses complicated jargon to describe what the iPad does, or any of its other products for that matter. And they are in the technology business; one of the most complicated fields out there.
Making our communication simpler makes it more meaningful to more people. We should make it our goal to kill some jargon.
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Copyright © 2005-2012 Josh Allan Dykstra
