I will confess to a bias. I believe that relationships are the economy of life, and that trust is the currency of that economy. I hear people say that they are leaving this organization or that one because they don’t like the politics. Politics are the manifestations of the economy at work, “the total complex of relations between people living in society:” sometimes messy, often unfortunate, always inevitable. It’s just a matter of people working things out together; trying to balance the authentic desire to act with others’ interests in mind while we are simultaneously trying to control our hardwired nature to survive and to promote our own agendas. Leadership in specific and life in general requires that we establish the balance, that we learn how to be trustworthy, and that we master relationships. As with any skill (Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours”) to become expert, we have to practice.
The picture is a family’s clever holiday card, all the more poignant because it is hauntingly familiar. Most of us can relate to a time when we were speaking with someone who answered a text message or a blackberry email mid-conversation. We have all seen the family in the airport or in a restaurant simultaneously on digital devices, and presumably not communicating with each other. Continue reading
Henry V 4.3 