Tag Archives: Leadership

Understanding Organizations: The Second Attribute of Positive Leaders

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Mastery of applied organizational theory is as vital to the success of leadership as knowledge of the piano is to the accomplished pianist. Organizations are the medium in which men and women function in society – they are the playing fields of life and business.

Positive leaders understand organizations in all of their complexity and are accomplished artists in both macro- and micro-organizational theory. Most managers possess, or at least utilize, only a rudimentary understanding of organizations. They are like novice personal computer users. They can stumble their way through a few application programs but their lack of in-depth understanding of the computer and its software keeps them from using more than a fraction of the machine’s capability. Occasionally they actually threaten or damage the system by utilizing it improperly or counter-productively.

At the macro level the positive leader is a student of organizational theory and devotes a significant amount of time keeping up with the literature of the field. At the micro level he or she is intimately in tune with his or her own organization, with its mission and vision; its products and/or services and the specific customer needs that these products and services fulfill; with its people, its personality and subcultures; with its supply chain; its metrics; and, with its informal power structures. The leader spends a significant amount of time out in the organization, and with its supply chain partners, listening, talking, and getting involved with people.

When confronted with the decision of choosing future leaders, from among its talented individuals, organizations must often choose between men and women with demonstrated leadership skills versus those with great technical knowledge and with familiarity with the local organization. Many people have technical expertise and local experience while only select few possess demonstrated leadership ability. Further, although leadership skills can be taught, it’s much easier to teach the technical and local aspects of an organization.

Organizations would do well to choose managers and supervisors on the basis of their demonstrated leadership ability. Organizations are also well-advised to make significant investments in the leadership development of its talented men and women, early in their careers. That being said, the most talented leaders will not achieve their optimal potential unless they make a relentless commitment to become masters of organizational theory and application at both the macro and micro levels.

Organizations typically promote their best workers to leadership positions. Just because an employee is at the top of the list of technical performers does not mean that they would make good managers and supervisors unless the organization has made an effort to prepare them for not only the role of leader but also for the transition from technical expert to formal leader. Often, people appointed to leadership positions on the basis of their technical excellence become unhappy and disillusioned with their new role. They were happier in a role in which they were valued for their technical expertise but rarely are they able to walk away. Often such promotions are the only way to move up the compensation ladder in an organization. Walking away from the disappointing leadership role may mean relinquishing the raise as well as losing face because they were unsuccessful.

If the organization has made an investment in leadership development of their best people prior to promoting them they will have identified those who will and will not be both happy and successful in a leadership role. For that reason, in addition to a focus on leadership development, the most successful organizations find a way to elevate the compensation of their technical stars to levels comparable to what they might have earned had they been given leadership responsibility. There is no rule that says that technical stars must not earn as much or more than their supervisors and managers.

One the other side of the equation, it is imperative that people who are appointed to leadership positions because of their demonstrated leadership ability rather than technical expertise make a commitment to ongoing development of their technical knowledge. They may not have to perform technical tasks as well as their technically-accomplished employees but the need to understand the technical aspects of the work every bit as much. They must also be able to teach new employees how to become technically competent.

A Healthy Self-Esteem, the 1st Attribute of Positive Leaders

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The first distinguishing characteristic of positive leaders – the first attribute – is a strong and positive self-concept. Positive leaders have a clear sense of who they are and where they are going. They have confidence in themselves and in their talents and abilities. They believe in themselves; they believe themselves to be somehow special. It is this core belief – this strong sense of self – from which the power of positive leadership emanates.
Leadership, as we have already discovered, implies taking risks, forging new concepts, charting new courses, breaking new trails. Leadership means going first – often where no man or woman has gone before. This takes great courage, confidence, and character and these traits, so common to the great leaders of history, are nothing more than manifestations of a strong self-esteem.

Leaders must be outwardly directed. They are concerned about the world and about other people. It is not that their own needs are left unattended – quite the contrary, positive leaders are secure in themselves. They know in the deepest part of their souls that they are okay – that nothing that can happen in the external world can diminish their worth as a living, breathing human being; as a child of Creation. From this foundation of a secure ego they are able to give freely of themselves. They have, in fact, discovered one of the greatest secrets of life: that the best way to serve one’s self, to feed a healthy ego, is to serve others. The more we give the greater the gifts we receive.

For men and women with an underdeveloped ego who find themselves in a leadership role, this is an alien concept. They have not reached the crest of the mountain from which they can see the panorama. They spend the greater part of their time and energy advancing their individual interests rather than attending to the needs of their organization and its people. As a result, as leaders they are ineffectual. Just as importantly, this self-serving behavior is apparent to the people with whom these individuals work and interact.

There are very few individuals for whom a healthy self-concept comes easily and most of us must work relentlessly at maintaining our self-esteem. Much like we must do with purpose, we must periodically step back and assess the health of our self-esteem. Unless we have perfected the process of retaining a healthy ego, the natural ebbs and flows of life can lead to disequilibrium. We are often unaware that our focus has shifted from the external world to the internal.

Effective positive leaders work relentlessly to maintain a healthy self-esteem much in the way individuals exercise their bodies to maintain physical health and well-being. Exposing ourselves to positive and inspirational thoughts and ideas is an important component of this ego-development process. It is also important to take time for introspection. Examine your strengths and weakness as objectively as you are able and then develop action plans to work on your imperfections. It is also suggested that you ask your closest friends or significant others to help you with this process as we are not always able to view ourselves the way others perceive us.

Remember always that we will never be perfect. Humans are, by definition, imperfect beings and there are no exceptions. It is not necessary that we are always right, what is important is that we strive to do what is right. Look around you at positive leaders. Often they are the strong, silent types who are so confident in themselves that it becomes unnecessary to boast of their prowess or accomplishments. The deeds of these men and women speak far more eloquently than anything they might say. You can possess this same confidence, this same sense of self if only you will reach out for it.

Customer Satisfaction: the Fourth Cornerstone of the Theory of Positive Leadership

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Business organizations exist to satisfy customers and embracing this credo serves as the fourth and final cornerstone of the philosophical foundation or our Theory of Positive Leadership.

If you are thinking:

“Duh! Aren’t we stating the obvious?”

you would be correct. Sometimes, however, it is critical that we state the obvious. Very often, things go wrong in organizations because we take our assumptions for granted. Over time, our assumptions tend to become blurred. One of our most fundamental assumptions is the order in which our customers can be found on our list of priorities.

Try this experiment. The next time you are in a room full of business men and women, ask them this simple question:

Do businesses exist to make money or do they exist to satisfy customers?

I have yet to ask this question without it sparking a very interesting and sometimes heated debate.

Many will insist that business organizations exist to make money. While there is no doubt that all business investments are made for the purpose of earning a return on one’s investment, once we choose our marketplace, everything changes. Once we have chosen a customer base (identified a population of customers with unmet needs or wants) and have identified the products and/or services we intend to produce (in order to satisfy those wants and needs) our ongoing purpose has irrevocably changed.

We now exist to satisfy our customers thus insuring their willingness to pay a fair price for that which we offer to sell. How much we make is nothing more than the way we keep score; the way we measure our success in satisfying our customers. Let’s restate this: the money our customer pays us is, now, nothing more than a function of the level of satisfaction they have with, first, our products and services and, secondly, with our performance as a valued and reliable supplier.

The day our customers begin to suspect that their satisfaction is secondary to our desire to make money, is the day we are at risk of losing that customer. Don’t misunderstand. Our customers understand that we have to make a profit just like we understand that our suppliers must make a profit. Neither we nor they want to think, however, that our suppliers would be willing to sacrifice the quality for which we have agreed to pay for a higher profit margin.

When a business leader chooses to sacrifice quality in order to make an extra buck, he or she has taken the first step down the precipitous path of inevitable failure. Think about your favorite restaurant, for example. You’ve become a regular customer because you have enjoyed the high quality of their menu, ambiance, and service over a period of many years. No doubt, you recommend the restaurant to your friends, family, and business associates, and also to people who might be new residents of your community or maybe are just visiting. You do not make such recommendations lightly; you do so only because you have a high level of confidence in the quality of experience your friends and colleagues can expect to enjoy.

Imagine a scenario when, on your next visit, you walk away disappointed in your dining experience. You certainly will not give up on your favorite place on the basis of one bad experience but it will start you thinking. How many bad experiences will you be willing to tolerate before you begin to downgrade that restaurant on your list of favorites. How many bad experiences before you stop recommending the establishment to other people? How many bad experiences before you stop eating at a place of which you have such fond memories? Very often when such a stream of events occur, it is because the ownership opted to cut back on the cost of producing your favorite selections from their menu; or when they lower their expectations of the staff who service their patrons and it does not just happen to restaurants. It can happen to manufacturers, healthcare providers, providers of any professional service, or retailers of any product or services. This is what happens when a business in any venue switches its focus to profits in lieu of customer satisfaction.

Successful businesses, on the other hand, as evidenced by the powerful positive leaders who guide them, possess a relentlessly passionate commitment to the satisfaction of their customers and this commitment drives every single thing they do and say. This commitment is a major component of the values of the organization and serves as the focal point for both vision and mission.

Plain and simple, businesses exist to satisfy customers. It is also a lesson that government and not-for-profit agencies would do well to remember. If you have any doubts, just think about what is happening with United States Postal Service.

People Are Our Most Important Resource, The Third Cornerstone of Positive Leadership

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The third philosophical cornerstone of our Theory of Positive Leadership is a commitment to the belief that people are the most important resource/asset of any organization. Organizations exist to serve people, whether individually or corporately. Business organizations exist to serve customers and other organizations such as not-for-profit agencies and departments or agencies of government exist to serve a constituency.

Organizations employ many different kinds of assets in the production of their products and services. Those assets include land, buildings, equipment, information, and technology in addition to people but it is people that are paramount. Nothing illustrates this more definitively that the knowledge that the very value of each of the other assets is measured in terms of their utility to people. It takes human energy to put all other assets to work for a meaningful purpose.

Interestingly, accounting practices allow us to treat non-human resources as depreciable assets but requires us to treat wages and salaries of a cost. This contributes, I believe, to the tendency of executives to think of people and their wages and salaries as a cost of doing business rather than as an investment in a valuable asset without which it would be impossible to do business.

One of the things that distinguish powerful positive leaders from their less successful counterparts is that everything these men and women do conveys clearly and unequivocally that the people of their organization are the most important asset – an invaluable resource.

Peter Drucker writes, “organizations that fail to develop their people, fail in the long run.”
Positive organizations relentlessly invest in the development of their people by insuring that their people:

• Receive ongoing training of a meaningful kind,
• Receive clear expectations
• Are supported by performance management systems that give ongoing positive feedback
• Work in an environment that is safe both physically and emotionally
• Enjoy compensation and benefit packages are not only competitive in the marketplace but that also reward excellence.
• Have the tools and resources necessary for the successful performance of their work
• Feel that they have some control over their own success, and
• Are full participants in the process of delivering exemplary quality.

Positive leaders also recognize that the members of their organization are not the only people who are critical to the ongoing success of their venture. Positive leaders understand that their ultimate success depends on all members of their supply chain and they work to create a culture of interdependence, partnership, and abundance mentality that spans the entire supply chain population.

The Gifts of Success: The Second Cornerstone of Positive Leadership

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Another philosophical foundation of our Theory of Positive Leadership is constructed on the axiom “it is better to give than to receive.”
Man is a social animal. Human beings have advanced to our current level of achievement because we have developed a sophisticated system of groups and organizations to facilitate the safety and prosperity of increasingly larger populations. From the first time man elected to pool his resources with that of others, to the very present, the success of the group has been contingent upon the willingness of the individual members to give of themselves, even if it means foregoing the immediate gratification of their own wants and needs. Similarly, nothing so threatens the group as the existence of individuals who choose, first, to serve their own self-interests.

One of the things that distinguish powerful positive leaders is the zeal with which they give of themselves to their organization and its people. These men and women understand that their own success is measured by the success of their people and their organization. Positive leaders work not only to advance the skills and accomplishments of individuals but also to create the synergies that occur when individuals come together as part of effective teams. They understand that, in effective organizations, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Zig Ziglar said it most eloquently:
“You can get everything you want and need out of life if you help enough other people get what they want and need.”

If you are a giving person and you strive everyday to help the people around you be successful, then you will be perceived as a leader and you will have captured the essence of success.

The gift of success is something that anyone can give and once you give it, remarkably, you also possess it, in full measure. Giving does not necessarily have to be of material things. It may be giving of one’s time and energy or of one’s talent. It may be doing one’s absolute best on the job or volunteering for a community project.

The world needs givers and lots of them. Be a giver and it will make a difference in the way you feel about yourself and about your life. It will make a difference in the quality of the relationships you have with your spouse, your children, and your friends. It will make a difference in the wholesomeness of your community. It will make a difference in the success of your business or career and, finally, it will make a difference for you financially.

Yes, there is an inherent risk in giving of oneself. There will be disappointments. Some people will let us down and others will even hurt us. These things are inevitable in life and will occur whether we give or take. True success and the most cherished joys in life come, however, only to those who give freely.

If you want a better marriage, give of yourself and be a better spouse. If you want better friends, give of yourself and be a better friend. If you want a more successful career, give of yourself and do a better job. If you want to be a part of a better organization or live in a better community, give of yourself and be a positive leader.

Giving fully of one’s self – holding nothing back – is, very simply, the key to success in life! It is magical, miraculous, simple, and relatively painless. “It is better to give than receive” is not just the secret of positive leadership it is a prescription for a democratic society.

The Positive Principle

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This is the second in a series of articles introducing the Principles of Positive Leadership!

The philosophical foundation of our Theory of Positive Leadership begins with the positive principle, which was introduced by Norman Vincent Peale in his seminal work, The Power of Positive Thinking, first published in 1952. Twenty-First Century readers are encouraged to read this work with the caveat that it was written by a Christian clergyman within a strong evangelical Christian context. Nevertheless, the message has great secular value.

The essence of the positive principle is that anything man can imagine, man can do. It is only when one has a belief in the possibility of a thing that it becomes possible. The positive principle also incorporates the belief that human beings are children of our creator and are essentially good. The message suggests that the world is full of negative forces and influences that will eat away at the esteem in which men and women view themselves, individually and as part of the world around them. The work is full of examples that demonstrate that “you do not need to be defeated by anything, that you can have peace of mind, improved health, and a never-ceasing flow of energy.”

Dr. Peale writes that we all want the same things out of life, “What every one of us wants, more than anything else, is life. Life is vitality; it is energy; it is freedom; it is growth.” Peale suggests that the differences between people, of whatever race, creed, or heritage are insignificant when compared to the similarities. Once one accepts this axiom, that we all want the same things out of life – that we are, in fact, interdependent – it becomes much easier to work toward win-win opportunities in both our personal and business relationships. Think about this in the context of supply chain management, that all members of a supply chain are interdependent and that the success of any one member is contingent upon and serves the success of the other members.

For leaders, irrespective of venue, this suggests that all the people within the organization are interdependent and that this interdependency extends beyond the boundaries of one’s organization to includes both those who serve and those whom are served by the organization and its mission.

The positive principle suggests that most of the obstacles that stand in the way of the achievement of our goals and objectives exist in our mind, not in the real world. Peale writes that “too many people are defeated by everyday problems of life,” and that this is “quite unnecessary. . . . People complain about the bad breaks they receive without any sense of how they, as individuals, can control and even determine those breaks.”

Positive Leaders understand that anything we can imagine is possible and that all human beings are linked by common objectives of the most fundamental kind. Positive leaders also understand that one’s focus on the positive is powerfully energizing on the one hand and serves to bring negative influences and factors into a manageable perspective. Positive leaders also believe that their relentless pursuit of ever higher levels of excellence serves the interests of all of the partners of a supply chain. It is based on the fundamental belief that every job done well contributes an element of beauty to the world.

Build Strength and Independence Not Weakness and Dependence!

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Whenever I give positive leadership seminars there are a number of recurring questions. One of the most common is “How do I get my people to accept responsibility for getting things done when I can’t be there to watch over them?” I love this question because its answer addresses some of the most common mistakes of managers and supervisors, irrespective of venue.

The answer to this seemingly inevitable questions is, simply, “If you want people to accept responsibility when you are away, teach them to accept responsibility when you are there.”

Many leaders are surprised to learn that they create dependencies as a result of their leadership approach. Our objective as leaders should always be to develop a staff of men and women who are strong and independent rather than weak and dependent. One of the ways to accomplish this objective is to teach and coach rather than to tell and do.

When issues arise in the midst of the game, when the pressure of time is upon us, it is easy for leaders to step in and solve problems and take action. In doing this we have, indeed, resolved the issue but we have, unwittingly, taught the lesson that only managers and supervisors cans solve problems, resolve issues, take action, and make things happen. The result, of course, is that the next time an issue arises, people stop and wait for their manager or supervisor to swoop in with a solution.

What positive leaders do, on the other hand, is teach their people how to solve problems and take action on their own. This can be accomplished only if we have created an environment in which people are expected to take initiative and in which there are minimal fears of making mistakes.

This approach is just another facet of delegating to people. Remember that the absolute best leaders are nearly invisible because they are seldom required to get involved in routine operational problem-solving. This is also one of the reasons why the best leaders are the most creative and innovative. They spend their time looking for opportunities to expand the boundaries of conventional wisdom.

The best leaders also spend significant chunks of their time giving support and feedback to their people. They are committed to the ongoing development of each of their employees. It is amazing how easy it becomes for people to respond positively to constructive feedback and to rise to ever-increasing expectations when they have come to view their supervisor as a coach and mentor rather than as a critic and task master. When people have also been given opportunities to learn new skills, gain new experiences, and are invited to participate routinely in the innovation process, true magic begins to happen.

Powerful positive leaders not only preside over a team of people who accept responsibility on their own but they also have men and women who look relentlessly for continuous improvement opportunities without being asked or prompted. Such expectations and the resulting behavior have become internalized as part of the culture.

One of the other managerial/supervisory behaviors that contribute to creating dependencies is the preservation of one’s own stature as the most skilled, knowledgeable, and competent person in the department.

Most supervisors are promoted, after all, on the basis of their technical competency. As soon as you are appointed to a leadership role, however, the supervisor’s purpose shifts. As a leader, our job is to help each of our people become the most knowledgeable, competent, and productive people of which they are capable. When some of those individual’s have surpassed the competency of their supervisors, then leadership excellence has been achieved.

Remember that, as a leader, your job is not to demonstrate how great you are rather it is to teach your people how great they can be.

Consequences of our Action: No One to Blame but Ourselves

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Imagine that you are an employer and economic conditions have required you to cut back wherever possible. Some of you reading this won’t have to try very hard to imagine such a scenario.

Imagine how your employees would feel if your response to the need for belt-tightening was to freeze wage rates or possibly even cut wages and benefits. On the benefit side, imagine that you dropped health insurance coverage for your employees and their families and that you suspended all travel and training programs, much of which had been offered to help your employees qualify for opportunities for advancement within you company.

It is reasonable to expect that your employees would be disappointed, at the very least, and we can be certain that some would be angry and resentful. During hard times, however, people understand that sacrifices must be made and the majority of your people would not lose their trust and respect for their employer or for you and your leadership.

Now, let us add a new variable to the equation. Let us assume that the members of the management team have not been asked to make corresponding sacrifices, even in this difficult economy. Imagine, in fact, that your management team is still eligible for the same salary increases and bonuses that were common when times were good. Imagine also, that the management team got to keep their executive health package and that they routinely attend training programs, seminars, and conferences in many locations around the U.S. and the world.
How would these factors affect the morale of your employees not to mention their loyalty to their company and its leadership team? Would they still be willing to endure the sacrifices they have been asked to make? Would they still be committed to the long-term best interests of your organization?

We all know, at least at an intellectual level, that such decisions on the part of management would have huge consequences with respect to their ongoing relationship with their people. No doubt many would begin looking for new opportunities.

Now, let us take a step back and think about the current reality about the way the federal government, particularly Congress and the executive branch, treat the American people at the low end of the economic continuum.

Whether these Americans are minimally employed, unemployed, on welfare or disability, depend on Medicaid or Medicare, or are on a fixed retirement income that depends almost totally on Social Security; every time the government feels the need to reduce spending it is the people in this group that are asked to take the hit. How do you think these people feel when Congress refuses to even consider asking the wealthy to pay a little more in taxes.

These Americans cannot get decent healthcare for their families, ObamaCare not with-standing, while they read about the extravagant health plan that Congress creates for themselves and their families. They also read that virtually every other developed nation on the planet considers healthcare to be a right of citizenship and provides comprehensive healthcare and prescription drugs for their people.
In the interim the poor, the unemployed, and the underemployed citizens of what is considered to be the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world are asked to believe in an American dream that is little more than illusion to them.

These people are told to take advantage of the opportunities of this great nation and that an education is the ticket to the American dream. What these American know to be true is that getting a good education is a myth when they are asked to send their kids off to public schools that have embarrassing failure rates and that seem to chew their children up and spit them out.

As a result, these Americans no longer believe in the American dream and they no longer teach their children that the dream exists. Neither do they teach their children that getting an education is important and something for which they should work hard and make sacrifices. Not surprisingly, the children of these Americans arrive at their first day of school with precious little motivation to learn and are poorly prepared to succeed. Rather than accept responsibility as a partner with their children’s teachers and principals for the educational success of their children, these mothers and fathers look at school as a form of free day care that keeps the kids out of the house for eight hours a day, five days a week.

They see an educational process that is focused on failure. When their children struggle to understand their lessons, rather than take extra time to make sure their kids understand, they see their children pushed prematurely from one lesson to the next by teachers who do not seem to care. The result is that their children fall further and further behind until they are so hopelessly lost that they give up on themselves. They begin to lose all hope that they can catch up with their classmates and they learn quickly that the surest way not to suffer the humiliation of failure is to avoid participation. The rest of us sit back in indignation, clueless to the dynamics of this reality.

The parents of these children understand what their children are feeling because it is the very same thing they felt when they were still in school. As a result they refuse to cooperate with their children’s teachers because they view those teachers as adversaries and as tellers of lies; as so-called professionals who simply cannot be trusted to do what is best for their children.

As this cycle of failure repeats itself semester after semester and year after year, why do we seem surprised that these children grow up and give birth to a whole new generation of children who are reared in an atmosphere of hopelessness and powerlessness.

Other Americans become frustrated with these people because they rarely exercise their right to vote and seem unwilling to accept the responsibilities of citizenship. We cannot quite comprehend that these Americans feel this way because they have absolutely no faith that their voices make a difference. As a result these men and women are effectively disenfranchised. They feel hopeless and powerless to control the outcomes in their own lives and in the lives of their children.

The rest of us point the finger at these Americans, never fully comprehending that the reality in which these Americans live and endure is one that exists solely as a consequence of our own actions; of the decisions and policies of people who view themselves as leaders of the free world.

As we have pointed out in earlier posts, we are fast approaching a tipping point in which mainstream Americans can no longer bear the weight of the poor, the uneducated, the hopeless, the powerless, and the disenfranchised. As we sit by in our blissful ignorance and self-righteousness, that tipping point is rushing at us at the speed of desperation.

The Kids Are at their Games Again!

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Yes, we all know we need to get people off of Food Stamps!

Yes, even though it is the law of the land we know the Affordable Care Act, affectionately or not so affectionately known as ObamaCare, is a bad solution that will only make the system worse and drive up costs because of its reliance on the health insurance industry.

But, why do we continue to play the same games. Rather than put our heads together in recognition that our country is in trouble and because we need to find some new solutions that will actually work, we play like two kids on the beach who cannot get along. Rather than build something beautiful, together, we devote all of our energy to tearing down the other guy or gal’s sand castle.

On the beach, the only consequence of such child’s play is that parents have a source of frustrated amusement that Bob and Sally can’t play together.

In the real world, at the seats of power of the United States of America, such games hurt people who can least afford to be hurt and bring us no closer to meaningful solutions.

When we use ObamaCare as leverage to try to win budget concessions in an attempt to reduce federal spending, we create a stalemate that will eventually lead to a government shut down or sequester that will take money out of the pockets of hard-working Americans and benefits away from the unfortunate who have no way to make up the difference.
Of greater long-term consequence is the fact that such stalemates and painful cuts only deepen the resentment of the disenfranchised who have already become embittered; they are citizens who no longer believe in the American dream and who have become hopeless, and feel powerless to change the outcomes in their lives.

As long as this population of the disenfranchised continues to grow, the burden that must be carried by the rest of us will only grow with no end in sight. Somehow, rather than push them further away from mainstream America we need, desperately, to find a way to pull these people back in as productive citizens who can help us face the challenges of an uncertain and rather frightening future.

When are we going to find positive leaders who can find a way to set aside their differences and work together to find solutions to the enormously difficult challenges confronting us? When will someone say “enough!” and begin working to pull people to the table to do the important work of our government?

Our elected officials in both the executive and legislative branches of our government have become trapped in their daily work that they have forgotten to step back and look at the panorama. The only thing they know is attack and destroy what their opponents want to accomplish and to remain committed to fruitless process of incremental change in dealing with monumental challenges; challenges that cannot be overcome incrementally.

For those of you who are reading these words, you are not powerless. Provide some positive leadership and begin expressing you concerns directly to your elected officials. Tell them what you think. Just as importantly, encourage the people you know to roll up their sleeves and share in the work.

The clock is ticking and when the tipping point is reached there will be no second chances.

America: A Leadership Crisis of Great Urgency!

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During the recent crisis with Syria, the Russian government as stepped up to offer a solution. What was most interesting was that Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, chided the U.S., in response to a statement by President Obama, noting that “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.”

However much we might resent Putin’s audacity to say such a thing, maybe we need to stop and think about the possibility that he could be correct.

Any illusions we might have had regarding the invulnerability of the United States as the richest and most powerful nation in the world were surely shattered in the wake of Standard and Poor’s decision to downgrade our nation’s credit rating in 2011. Our inability to dictate our political and military will in the Middle East and the blatant hatred demonstrated by the people who have attacked our Embassies are examples of a recurring theme that challenges our nation’s belief in itself as somehow special.

Maybe it is time for the American people to step back and take stock of who we are and how rate when compared to other developed and developing nations in the world.

The U.S. national debt is measured in trillions of dollars, with China, the single greatest challenge to our economic supremacy, our largest creditor. Our ability to compete in the world marketplace over the next half-century is dependent on the quality of the American workforce, which, itself, is powered by the American educational system. According to The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the U.S. ranks 25th in math, 17th in science, and 14th in reading out of the 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.[1] That China ranks first in all three areas should strike fear, if not outright panic, in every American heart.

We are in the midst of a crisis of historic proportions in which our way of life as a people is in jeopardy. It is a crisis that cries out for positive leadership and yet our elected leaders in Washington stomp around like spoiled and stubborn children who have yet to learn how to work and play with others.

The challenges facing our nation and its people are immense. Whether our burdensome debt; an economy that is only a shadow of its former self; a natural environment that seems to be stumbling under the weight of a burgeoning population that fouls the very air that we breathe and the water we drink; a system of public education that is laden with failure; a health care system that fails to meet the needs of nearly a full third of its citizens, we place our future in jeopardy unless we meet these challenges.

We use oil, a diminishing natural resource, to fuel our demand for energy even though the future will belong to the first nation to develop reliable, alternate sources of energy whether solar, hydrogen, or nuclear fusion. Worse, we are dependent on foreign suppliers of oil that are friendly to us only as long as we are able to pay.

We are a people who have forgotten that the historical strength of our democracy has always been our rich diversity as a people living together, in harmony, under the rule of law. Today we govern ourselves with a two-party system in which loyal opposition has given way to enmity and distrust to such an extent that each side feels the other is out to destroy America.

We must understand that the problems of the Twenty-first Century are of such magnitude that the politics of the past are no longer adequate to meet our needs. We must find fresh solutions that satisfy the needs of the masses on the one hand and that foster a strong economy on the other. We need the kind of leadership that will demand that its people replace a rampant entitlement mentality with an abundance mentality centered on the belief that there is enough for everyone as long as each citizen is willing to give one hundred percent of themselves through hard work and participatory citizenship.

We need leadership that understands that we cannot preserve our nation’s status as the richest and most powerful nation in the world just because we think it is our right and privilege.

We are like a baseball or football team that has been in first place for so long we have forgotten what it took to rise to the top and we have become complacent. Right now, people of other nations, with China and Russia leading the way, are working hard to challenge our nation’s status. Just as importantly, the children of China and other nations are working hard to gain what they believe is an educational advantage that will seal the deal for their people and economy in the Twenty-first Century and beyond. That they are outperforming American children by a wide margin is simply unacceptable and we must answer the bell.

It is unreasonable to think that one nation will be able to dominate the future the way America has dominated the past but if we want a place at the head table, we have to elevate our game. To do so, we must reunite as a people and demand the best from ourselves, from our fellow Americans, from our children, and from our political leadership. We can ill afford to waste a minute let alone a generation.

Stand up, toe the mark, and get moving while we can still see the coat tails of our competitors. We need positive leadership and it must start with each and every one of us. That means me and it means you!