Lead and Manage, or be led and managed by others. It’s about freedom and making life good for ourselves and others. We can learn and use processes for creating good relationships with people that we use in life—personal, family, work, business, community and planet.
Leadership and management are not only positions of authority that select people have been appointed to or elected to. That’s a political view that supports cultures of domination, not democracies.
It is helpful to realize that everyone already is, in some ways, a leader and a manager in the world: We all are, for better or worse, leading and managing our lives right now!
It’s good to gain some expertise in self-organization and collaborative management; at a minimum, a basic understanding of how to participate effectively in the leadership and management of our personal, family, work, and community life is useful. This work begins to lead us out of a wholly dependent and self-centered way of life and into an independent and interdependent adult life of caring for others and the world. These vital life skills are the basics of any leadership and management. And they are the core competencies for all organization leadership and management.
Life in the 21st Century is faster-paced and much more complex than ever before. Shortly after World War II, the population of the world was 2.5 billion. Today it is about triple that—7.5 billion. That means there are five-billion (that’s five thousand million) more people alive today and they all want to do the same things you and I want to do—live, work, and enjoy life. Yet we live in a man-made economic system that is designed to encourage rapidly increasing production and consumption that uses money invented by banks who create it while charging interest (profits) that they keep for themselves; money is no longer a natural, limited, resource that has to be hunted for and gathered.
The world now has an urgent need for a economic system that facilitates quality of life as well as quantity of goods and services. A triple bottom line of people, planet, and profits would be a life-enhancing system.
Yet, in the midst of all this conflict and opportunity, all of us need to become as good at leading and managing as we can so we can continuously work to improve our lives, our organizations and communities, and our world.