The Unethical World

Every single day you make logical ethical decisions without even knowing it. When you order a meal at a restaurant you pay the bill because it is ethical to do so and unethical not too. The problem is that there is no absolutism in ethics. It is a constantly evolving and changing idea. It is relative to who you are and where you are at what time. How violence is looked at depends entirely on the area that you are in. There are many guidelines that people follow to better them selves but there is never one absolute rule and often rules conflict.

Chernobyl has recently been revisited after the nuclear meltdown 25 years ago. Although we do not know what exactly happened at the plant we do know that there was disagreement between the upper and lower management in the plant. The upper management followed contract ethics according to their higher management, which said that if not all was going well somebody had to be punished. The lower management followed publicity ethics knowing that if something was going wrong they didn’t want upper management to know about it creating conflicting ideas.

Another example of conflicting ethics is Glenn Beck’s uproar right after the economic crash. This is an example of Rule Ethics as he wanted everybody else to be afraid of the coming doom. Many people followed but all of a sudden the market is starting to turn itself around and he is losing his roar. The people are now recognizing that we are in the clear are moving toward a Utilitarian idea where everything you do is for the good of the people. Glenn Beck’s ideas are no longer for the good of the people. His ideals are falling apart beneath him and he needs to transition as the world transitions.

Ethics are certainly not perfect but they are incredibly useful. Sometimes ethics are very simple and sometimes they are incredibly complex. One of the most common debates although certainly not recent is whether or not abortion should be allowed. This is incredibly complex and includes many different forms of ethics including Kantian and Niche. It also applies heavily to the situation that these ethics apply. At many hospitals they have ethics committees that go over whether or not one should be allowed to preform a certain operation. Whether or not it is ethical to do certain things to one’s body is entirely debatable.

So how do we solve this problem of conflicting ideals? To tell you the truth it is entirely up to you. If there is no one rule and neither of you are technically wrong sometimes it is better to back off. Although this seems difficult nobody ever said it was. Wait be passive today and strike aggressively tomorrow.

Social Super Hero

If you have lived in the United States for the past 30 years of your life then you know that this society is based on how you socialize with other people. A large function of what goes into your ability to socialize is your identity. There is one important thing that you must understand about your identity, even though you shape that does not mean that you have the right to decide what it looks like in the end. That is for the eye of the beholder. This is what is called ascribed identity. I have seen friends who are not homosexual but have been believed to be homosexual based on their actions and I have also had friends that are homosexual but have not been perceived to be.

I recently had a friend that was thought to be a homosexual by what he considered to be a close friend. This process continued for some time before my friend realized that his friend perceived him differently then he thought he saw himself. This did not just put him in the position of ascribed identity but also gave him membership to a group that he may or may not have wanted to be a part of. This group does not have a lot of privileges. In fact this group is a target of oppression. This is when a group has disadvantages or barriers that puts them in a specific place in society. These barriers are called institutions.

A great example of oppression is taking place in Libya today. There are two kinds of people in currently present in Libya. There is the military and there is the average citizen. The thing is that there is no way that the people decide whether or not to be a civilian or part of the military they have an ascribed identity. And then on top of having this ascribed identity they have been oppressed by the government and forced to live miserable lives. Although there is oppression there is also privilege. These are advantages that you are born with unless you believe in Horatio Alger who said that all men were equal, but some just worked harder than others and that is why they were better off. If other people worked as hard, they would be well off too. But If I am born a white straight male then more likely then not I am better off then any other circumstance.

Privilege can also be abused. One such idea is Egypt where the leader abused his power for a very long time. It angered the citizens and eventually caused an uproar, which took his privileges away.

People are oppressed but people with privilege oppress people. It is very important that we do not mix the two ideas together and cause an uproar like what happened in Egypt.

The Culture Problem

To be a successful leader you need to be inclusive. But the problem of culture makes it very difficult to be inclusive. There is what is known as the iceberg effect. You see how big the iceberg is above the water but you cannot accurately depict how much of the iceberg is under the water. There are many things that you do not know about a culture until you actually deal with the culture. For a small example most people do not know that it is incredibly rude to show the soul of your shoe in the Middle East. It would be the same as giving somebody the middle finger here in the west.

A greater example was when I arrived in Tucson. I come from a very large metropolis where you must be on time to everything and everything that happens, happens very quickly. It took me a long while to notice the difference when I came here but the speed at which things happen is very different from the city. People talk very slowly and expect the same out of you. When I talk at the speed that I am used to talking people find it very difficult to understand me so they ask me to slow down. When people show up to class I am very used to being in class at least five minutes before I am required to. It seems here that people are used to arriving between 5 or less to class. Now this could actually be one of two things. One it could be the culture of Tucson or two it could be the culture of the university. One way or another it is still odd and it is something that I did not see coming. Lastly was the way that I talked. Most people here have a basic American accent, which I also thought that I had. It turns out that I have the slight tint of a Chicago accent that some people questioned why I talked that way. It is also distracting to me when people try to say Chicago because I say it so different from them.

These are all part of the iceberg effect things that I could not see until I traveled under water out of my comfort zone. It is important to travel underwater as a leader.

A good leader has to be willing to exit his or her comfort zone for the betterment of society. When volunteers head over to japan to help with the earthquake the must understand the needs of the people that they are dealing with. The way that you greet people in Japan is very different from what you do here in the United States. Things like this should always be considered.

Vision Quest

When I think of mission I think of James Bond not a way that you act. You might be able to twist the words to make it sound like they are similar but they really aren’t the same. I think of a mission statement as a statement to the way you should act to reach your vision. You mission should also be in line with your morals. Your vision is nothing more then an over all goal for your life. If you complete your vision statement in your lifetime then either it wasn’t big enough or you need a newer bigger one.

Take the recent earthquake in Japan as an example. If your vision were to clean up the damage that happened after the earthquake it wouldn’t be a very good vision. There are many other people with the same idea. It will take time to clean the mess but it will eventually be finished before the die. If you vision were to keep the world clean that would be a pretty good vision. Both nature and humanity consistently makes the world into the mess. You might have to clean up a town that was ravaged by a civil war or maybe the mess of the war, maybe you just clean up all the parks in your local town for a start. There is a lot to do towards this vision and it basically never ends but it is a goal.

What about your mission statement in this vision what would that be. I would say to pick up trash, clean parks, and rebuild homes would be a pretty good mission statement. It is straight to the point and it helps move towards your overall vision of a clean world.

A great place that you will often find a great vision is in science. The idea of quantum computing has been around for while but there have been many recent jumps towards it. Many scientists are shifting their missions towards becoming quantum computing because of their visions. Quantum computing is incredibly useful in complex subjects like artificial intelligence and the universal theory. As fast as our computers are at computing today Quantum computing is incredibly fast and is incredibly small making it very useful. Most of these scientist may never see their work come to creation as their visions are outrageous but they are making a move towards it using their mission statement.

So you have a vision that you wish to attain. This vision is not simple or easy. The vision may never be obtained. You create a mission that will move you towards that over all vision. This mission meets with your goals and your morals. Now you have both a mission statement and you have a vision statement.

Follow the Leader

I believe that a whole lot of people as well as me hate to follow. Kind of the problem with a leadership course or club, you have a bunch of people all striving to be leaders and very few people want to be followers.
Maybe that is why I have lost so much respect in my class. I want to be the leader so I never shut the fuck up hoping I am right. This is not very useful when I do not know what I am talking about. Sure sometimes I do know what I am talking about. Maybe I have done a lot of research on the subject. But nobody knows everything. So when I start rambling on about bull crap it does a pretty good job of angering the class.
I do not believe that I am the only one in the class that does this but I do seem to have gone over the limit. If you haven’t figured this out this makes me a terrible follower. It doesn’t really help to support my leader or the teacher as it disturbs the class. Maybe I try to help the boss by answering a question but what is the point if I don’t know the answer. I’m also not too good at receiving feedback or at understanding my role.
On the other hand I do meet some of the requirements of a good follower. I’ll take initiative to a question. Even if my answer is wrong it creates uproar of answers from the rest of the class. Obviously I always keep the boss informed. But of course I always say thanks to the boss as long as what he or she does something to better the whole class.
So how does some one like me learn form my failures. Well for starters I can start by only talking when there is something that I am well knowledgeable in, things like Business and some European History. In this case it helps support the teacher and any students that disagree may have research that says other wise or may not have any knowledge in the subject and are throwing in an opinion that is not creditable, in which case they are the ignorant follower for once. As well I can sit down write the feedback I get and then read it ten times before I enter class.
These are of course only a couple of ideas that can be implemented to make me a better follower. I will need a lot of work before I can become both a good follower and a good leader but that is why have started this adventure of life, so that I can learn. And of course if I do not learn the wolves will eat me. So it all works out in the end.

The Process of Leadership

Everything goes through a process. You are born, you grow up, and then you become old and die. This process happens over and over again and it works for us. So what if you developed a process for leadership?

Well they did and they called it process theory. So here is what goes into this process. The first is a purpose something that you and your group are working towards. You have to have inclusiveness. Everybody is part of the process; leaving people out of the process will only delay the solution to the purpose. You also need to empower the people in your group. This can be done in many ways but low moral always slows down the process. Contrary to popular belief moral does not improve with continuous beatings. Finally you have to be weary of ethics. Lying and saying that “witches possessed you” only works in a group for so long until somebody in the group steps up. Ethics are very complicated but there are many standards such as lying and stealing that everybody follows. It’s a process it works. Government is a great example of this process and when they don’t follow the process they have a tendency to run into problems.

Speaking of governments not following the leadership process Libya has been running into a lot of problems in the past couple of the weeks. This is a true example of somebody who doesn’t follow the process. Governments have many purposes; among them is protecting the people and preserving them as a country. They aren’t doing to good at moving towards their purpose. They leave just about everybody out, as their country is a dictatorship instead of a democracy that the people want. Well there goes inclusiveness. As for empowerment… Maybe I shouldn’t have made that joke before about the beatings. This government is sadistic; instead of empowering them they just beat them down until all forms of hope are lost. What about there ethics? More like what ethics? The entire problem is there lack of basic human rights. They are lied to, cheated, beaten, and often murdered. There is no leadership process at least not as a country.

What about their military? It almost works but it still doesn’t quite. The entire military is included in there actions. Inclusiveness is met. The men feel empowered as they stand over the people shoving their guns into them. Yet there is still a problem with the process. There are still no ethics. The system doesn’t work and now it is beginning to backfire on them.

The process doesn’t always work and it isn’t always used but it is important to keep you mind open for things of such magnitude. It could change the lives of many.

Situational Skills

Who should work where? Well that is always a good question to ask. In leadership one-way to decide who should be manager of what is through skills. If you have high technical skills but low conceptual skills you should probably be in supervisory management. If you are highly conceptual but have very few technical skills you should be in upper management. If you have both, on the other hand, you should be in middle management as you are the middleman between the two ideas. But what is interesting about all of this is that no matter what you should have strong people skills as a manager.
When I worked as a caddy over the summers I had a relatively good leader. He wasn’t amazing but for the most part he knew what he was doing and he knew how to act with both the golfers and the caddies. You could consider him a middle manager between the two. The golfers held a share of the property so they decided what happened to it. They had the conceptual skills. Now the caddies are a bad example of supervisory management but lets just say they supervised the ball for the golfers as the golfers wanted them to supervise it. But as all people do eventually he moved up the ladder. Unfortunately for the caddies and the golfers we were left with a new manager that was in the wrong place. This manager had high technical skills and very low conceptual skills as well as low people skills. He didn’t know how to work with people he yelled at the caddies all the time for minor incidents and his smile made the golfers uncomfortable. When the golfers had a conceptual idea he had no ability to relay it to the caddies. It was a real disappointment to the golf club and I.
On top of skills there is situational leadership. This is based on two principles; support and directive. You need different people in different situations depending on whether high or low support and high or low directive is needed.
Once again the caddy master used the wrong leadership in this situation. The caddy master used to be in the marines where the majority of leadership is high directive and low support. You really don’t have time to be supportive of somebody while being shot at.
Thankfully there were no guns being shot on the golf course but he decided to make it as if there were. Some of the caddies were young and required a lot more support as well as directive but he only offered directive. Some caddies new exactly what they were doing and yet he still gave them directive. And then there were caddies who new what they were doing and yet were feeling down but he didn’t offer support only directive. He was simply a bad leader.
Needless to say it didn’t take me very long before I left the club to look for other jobs. It will be a disappointment on my life but there is nothing that I can do about it other then walk away and attempt to never be like him.

Not so Great Man

Would you say that people who are great or do great things were born for greatness? Would you be able to pick out a child from a nursery and say that one will be the greatest? Or watch a family of children grow up and decide which one will be the greatest? For a long time it was thought that people were born great and that you could find these people based on the traits they were born with. Now according to Newtonian mechanics you are born with a destiny to be great but that’s a bunch of complicated mumbo jumbo that we are going to ignore for now. For now we will look at trait theory and why it doesn’t work.

People have done many tests to discover which traits, both mentally and physically, make the best leader. Although there are traits that match up well with people in other professions the traits that were discovered to make a good leader were only applicable to situations not professions. The great leaders that we look at today were people who made a huge difference in a time of great strife but even more often we are not in a time of great strife. Even though we are not in a time of great strife there are still problems to attend to. Who is going to look at these problems? Well the first answer would of course be a leader. The thing about solving the problem now is that we don’t need a leader with high achievement, low affiliation, strong persuasion, and a hierarchy power structure. For this problem we need a network structure, which requires an immense ability to affiliate. The situation has now changed entirely causing the traits of the leader to change entirely.

So could you reuse an old leader from a totally different situation to attend to this situation? Or are the traits that the leader was born with static? Now although these are questions based around Behavioral Theory, which implies that they were learned. But what if they were not learned the leader just changed naturally like a lizard changes color. Could these changes be traits that the leader was born with? Or could it be behavioral so that the leader was taught when and how to change?

Now there are many theories that people have and there are many sub-categories within these theories. Trait has multiple such as the distinction between physical and mental traits or emotional and intelligence traits. Now all of a sudden you have traits cancelling each other out making potentially good leaders bad leaders and potentially bad leaders good leaders. In the end although Trait Theory sounds like a good theory it ends as being impractical. The actions of the human population are too complex and change at such a high rate of speed that there is no way to accurately predict leaders based on traits.

History of Leadership in Western Culture

As in the last post leadership has changed significantly in the past. This is post look more heavily at that and how the theories changed. There is first a tribal look. Then there is a look at monarchies. Lastly there is a look at the past century.
The first set of leadership was tribal leadership. This was a time period where leadership both had some implications of genetic advantage and at the same time leadership had to be earned. The tribal leader was chosen often because he fought his way to the top. Although some members might have been born with larger muscles or quicker reflexes they still had to work to get their position. From the top the leader would give task-oriented orders and persuade with fear for he was the toughest. If anybody were to object to his leadership and fail they would be killed or exiled, as they would create problems amongst the tribe if they were allowed to stay.
Although this worked for a while our brains began to grow larger and now higher positions were held to those with technology. Somebody with a bronze sword could kill a stronger man who doesn’t have a strong sword. But of course this technology was rare and there for only held by higher positions.
Now although this is difficult to think about, religion and spirituality is a social technology. It is something many of us use everyday. And it was the people that create these religions that hold the highest power as they hold the technology. They are also the ones who chose the leaders. The problem was that they really didn’t have a good system for creating leaders and so sometimes the leaders didn’t make very good leaders. Many of these leaders were murdered before somebody else was to take their place. It is more likely that you would be murdered as a king then if you were to walk around a third world country in a civil war.
As time continues on and these appointed leaders begin to become more intelligent they also begin to become more independent. This breaks down the religions and redistributes the people. At this point knowledge is become less and less limited to the higher powers and more to the lower class. This transition happens from the beginning to the end of the 20th century.
As we reach into the end of the twentieth century republics become more and more relevant as everybody has enough information at the palm of their hand to make an educated decision. This is great, as everybody is educated, but this now creates an even more complex society then society already was.
Every time previously has had its advantages and disadvantages and every time in the future will have its advantages and disadvantages, as we are an ever-changing society.

Definition of Leadership

            The definition of leadership is an interesting subject. The fact is that there is no one true definition of leadership. Instead there are many ideas that accumulate into the definition of leadership. The first thing you must realize is that the definition has changed many times in the past century. The second and more important is to realize the specific words that go into it.

            The definition has changed over the century quite extensively. Leadership is a changing theory in science. There is a hypothesis that is tested. The results, although not exact, are reviewed and then a new hypothesis is made. This process is repeated over and over again.

            The problem now is that leadership is an organism in the sense that it has to adapt to its environment. The environment used to move very slowly. China kept their dynasty system for a very long time. Europe kept their dictators and kings for a very long time. It was a system that worked for those regions. As the way we communicated changed so did leadership. For a very long time the way we communicated changed very slowly. This was true up until the industrial revolution when globalization took over causing the way we communicated to change at a very rapid pace. What this meant is that leadership changed at a very rapid pace making it difficult for the human race to have a grasp on it. Tomorrow something new will come out causing leadership to be re-evaluated.

            This is no reason to discourage us from adapting along with it. As a society we are always looking for new leaders as we have gotten used to discarding them after 4 to 8 years. Although this what the United States does with their presidents we have gotten to the point where we are discarding corporate leaders at a very high pace. MySpace used to dominate the social world before being discarded. Facebook is only a matter of time before the next social network knocks it out of place UNLESS they are intelligent and adapt to the everlasting needs around them. The problem is that many people are not adapting along with leadership and they are quickly devastated.

            So how does one keep up to date with leadership? Exactly as I said before it is a science. You make a hypothesis test it evaluate the results and repeat. Studying the science of leadership is crucial to the development of the human race. We need leadership in some way shape or form or our well-structured society will crumble beneath us. Although there are many keys to success Leadership should be, without a doubt, on your ring.