Lack of Leadership = Failure, Every Damn Time!
A couple weeks ago I wrote about the family estate and how rare it is nowadays. I believe a lack of cohesion within the family unit is the most obvious reason. That lack falls upon the patriarch and matriarch of the family, but again, even the idea of a family leader has been lost. There is no unity.
Imagine starting a company with a few partners, but each of you has a different vision for the direction in which you see the business going in the first ten years. Imagine not being able to develop a cohesive plan for the first ten years! Competing ideas in the front office when it comes to direction is a recipe for disaster.
Now imagine a political or cultural movement that has drawn people together under the common goal of increasing freedom for individuals, but no one bothers to explain exactly how that will be accomplished. Leadership sets an initial goal and gets people excited about it and they work hard to “make things happen.” But once that primary achievement is attained, people realize that initial goal did not contribute to the aforementioned “increasing freedom for individuals.” People are left standing there wondering what comes next. Maybe an end goal is announced, but it is of little interest to those recruited to the movement. What are you left with? And those who feel dejected and complain or quit are then ridiculed for not believing in leadership’s vision, although no clear vision was provided and/or the vision deviated from the original plan.
I don’t care if you are dealing with a family, church, business, or political party or PAC; without a clear plan and vision for the path forward, failure will be your destination. If most people have to make a list to go to the damn grocery store, what makes you think you can wing it when it comes to expansive goals set with masses of people in tow? Failures in leadership are often failures in planning, and if your leaders haven’t communicated a plan to you or informed you when plans are forced to change, you are not following leaders; you are following failures. Having to tell people that following terrible leaders will always result in failure should set off alarm bells about who the problem REALLY is.
There is a big hole in my life that a mindset like this could have filled. My dad passed on that frantic"just do anything to keep busy" mindset with no established leadership ideals and no plan but just a life of jumping from the next crisis to the other.
I fervently want there to be a difference in the family my wife and I create. Thank you for speaking into our lives, Pete.
The question of leadership is why I can't take most the people talking about decentralization seriously. They are almost never talking about a bunch of different smaller well organized and led groups who are operating independently; its usually some version of a mass of individuals who will emergently somehow accomplish something with no organization or direction. Not that decentralization is bad in itself (I personally believe strongly in subsidiarity and localism) so much as they are advocating for the most unworkable and useless version of it, usually this will come with some vague inspiration from blockchain as if a cryptic technology and political organization are at all interchangeable.