Our Information Driven World
Let me butcher a paraphrased idea:
I think it was John Maxwell who said: One of the biggest differences between leaders of today and great leaders of the past is the culture in which they were called to lead.
The main difference? Technology. Let me explain…In the days of our country’s founding fathers, leadership decisions didn’t have the time constraints that they have today. In the 1800’s and early 1900’s, patience existed in leaders and in people. So when a problem arose, it took days and weeks for the leader to even learn of the problem. During that time, the problem could be fixed. During that time, another person may have had to make a call and may have fixed the problem all together anyway. So out of necessity, leaders rose up, and the only problems that reached top leadership were HUGE CONTINUAL problems.
On top of that, leaders had time to process the HUGE CONTINUAL problems. There was not and expectation of a nanosecond decision. So, in my opinion, the culture of early America supported the demands of leadership.
However, with the invention of the phone/air travel/the Internet/e-mail/blogs/social networking/micro-blogging (twitter) the demands of leadership has gone up. We have become a society that is not conducive for raising up leaders because it’s too easy to have someone else fix your problems.
Here’s my big problem with this:
1. It creates a pressure of expectation for leadership that will burn leaders out.
2. It perpetuates the consumerism mentality.
In other words, we are going to put so much pressure on our leaders that they will burn out or lose our confidence, and at the same time, become more and more dependent on leadership. The picture in my mind looks a lot like the movie Idiocracy.
We have become and are continuously becoming a saturated society. There is more information out there than we can possibly consume. Whether that’s good or bad depends on how you approach that information. Consume or discern. In our culture (and in my opinion), the only way we survive as a society is fight consumerism in ourselves by discerning information and the use of technology and learning to fix our own problems rather than being dependant.
BTW - I love that I used the very technology that I am talking about in this post to perpetuate this message.
Okay…rant over…
