Leading Change: Handbook Entry, Week 8

Journal Entry – Week 8,
16/09/08

Another
presentation done and dusted and another bunch of points to be added
to the final grade. It’s quite a milestone to know that two
thirds of the deliverables for a paper are now delivered and it’s
only a few more weeks until the whole process is done and dusted.

The
presentations were an interesting bunch. I liked the one about God,
otherwise known as the captain of the Indian cricket team. It seems
that people are really good at figuring out what leaders to follow
when the chips are down and everything it coming apart. Other
leaders that were discussed included Hitler and Churchill. Both of
these men were charismatic leaders who arose during times of
depression and who were adept at using language as a means to
galvanise a nation into action. Human emotion is a most primitive
and yet most powerful force when manipulated by a leader who
understands it. If you can emotionally engage a group of people you
can make them do great evil or good depending on the purpose of your
movement. I remember a friend of mine who grew up in Northern
Ireland saying that the best feeling he ever had was being part of a
riot. Nothing is as intoxicating as being part of a violent mob that
is destroying something or someone. I think a lot of modern
politicians emulate the strategies and tactics of these leaders
seventy years later. Robert Mugabe springs to mind.

Other
leaders were of an entirely different nature. The Prime Minister if
India is an educated man, a professor of economics at Oxfords and
grew up in poverty, hating the caste system. Like Ghandi, he has
built a following based on hard work and providing a good example.
He really believes in the power of economics to change people’s
lives for good and it’s working for India.

Barnardos
is a nice movement that grew out of the Victorian era in industrial
England. He was one of the few people who didn’t automatically
believe that being poor was your own fault. Patch Adams was another
leader who was discussed. He set out to provide free healthcare to
poor people in the United States, a group that is largely ignored by
a health system that only provides help to those who can afford it.

Jengis
Khan was the last leader who not only followed through on this
promises but brought a written language to the Mongol people. With
out that it is possible that all of the good stuff he did would be
written out of history by the Chinese, Persians and Europeans who
hated his guts. Sure one could say he ruled by force, but his
people followed him because they knew that he would support them in
the event that they were attacked by someone else. He was a leader
who followed through on that promise of protection, usually to the
detriment of the civilisations who chose to piss him off.

What have
I learned from all this? Well it’s an interesting journey
being the academic world and now that the end is drawing close I’m
wondering about the futility of it all. Will all this hard work lead
somewhere or am I going to just go back to the same old stuff as
before? I don’t rightly know yet but I’m still thinking
about plans to make something happen.