Archive for the ‘Leadership’ Category

Why some people do & some people dont

Sunday, August 1st, 2010

I have been thinking this week about why some people just get stuck into things and get them done and while some other people like to talk about doing things, meet about doing things and then in the end don’t do things.

I think the major thing that is missing in so many groups, schools & governments is the magic ability to get things done and to get people doing things. I firmly believe that when you start to get people doing things tha the world will be a better place to live in.

For even if people start to do the wrong things they will at some point learn from the fact that they have done something wrong & if for some reason they do not learn well someone else will surely learn from their mistakes.

That is why it is so important for people in society to turn off the TV, think about something good to do and then to do that thing. It is all about doing in my opinion.

What do you think? And more importantly what have you done recently?

  • Share/Bookmark

Liz Coleman on Education and ABC of Learning

Monday, July 26th, 2010

Bennington president Liz Coleman delivers a call-to-arms for radical reform in higher education. Bucking the trend to push students toward increasingly narrow areas of study, she proposes a truly cross-disciplinary education — one that dynamically combines all areas of study to address the great problems of our day.

I have really enjoyed listening to this TED presentation where Liz has suggested that we need to promote a generalist education. She is calling for Active Citizens to do things that will help change the world for betterment.

What do you think of what she has to day? You have a mind and you have other people, start with those and change the world!

  • Share/Bookmark

Military leadership

Friday, July 23rd, 2010

Genghis Khan, Rommel, Saigo, Alexander, napoleon, Patton and Nelson are all names that are sonorous with being great leaders of men. These heavy weights of leadership were able to get men to give up their lives for their countries.
One of their great skills lay in the ability to have the vision to see things as they actually were in the battle. This gave them the advantage of being able to deploy troops where the key battles were going to be fought.
Some of them would refer to it as a gut feeling and others just the right thing to do or even a sixth sense. Their ability to process large quantities of information about the pending battle in their brain was splendid. Then the nerve to make a split second decision and the bottle to take so many men’s lives into their hands must have been hard to handle at times.

Today in business the top leaders have to do the same things if they are going to navigate the high seas of recession. It is no longer a broad side that a great leader has to face it is banks phoning him about lone problems or a competitor capturing your best staff and not your soldiers.
There is so much that we can learn about leadership from the great military leaders of the past! My favourite is the Japanese samurai and leader Saigō Takamori who is yours?

  • Share/Bookmark

Leading through Active Citizenship

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

I was going into Dublin on last week and there were three young girls about eight or nine on my street with a little table selling stuff. I went over to it and they were selling sweets.

They asked me did I want to buy something and that the money was going to a good cause. I asked them what the cause was and they told me all the profits were going to help the people that were affected by the Haiti earthquake.

Needless to say I was delighted to see three young Active Citizens who were leading through Active Citizenship at such a young age. There are quite a few people out in the world who are three and four times the age of these young girls that would not show such great leadership.

I paid €10 for a bar of chocolate and the young girls were delighted and I was so happy to see some young active citizens on my street. I also let them know about Active Citizenship week that is happening in Ireland from the 3rd to the 10th of October and pointed them to the website www.fifty-ways.com

This was a great example to me that sometimes we can overcomplicate simple things and that it can be good to just get out and do something simple like selling chocolate bars.

  • Share/Bookmark