Philosophy

Leadership: A Human Encounter

ICON_PLACEHOLDEREstimated reading time: 7 minutes

Thomas Carlyle observed ‘the history of the world is but the biography of great men.’ In many ways, much business literature about ‘leadership’ only gets as far as Carlyle in its thinking and then rests, sure in the belief leaders are self-made people from whom lessons can be drawn and leadership techniques formalised. A classic example of this is an approach adopted by Howard Gardner in comparing eleven ‘leaders’ with a group of ten political and military leaders to test notions about leadership. Yet such views are simplistic, as those who go beyond Carlyle have found in the writing of Herbert Spencer:

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The City of Love

ICON_PLACEHOLDEREstimated reading time: 6 minutes

One of the basic rules of the universe is that nothing is perfect. Perfection simply doesn’t exist.

Stephen Hawking

There is an old adage, the more we have the more we can give. This is true of temporal things as I can’t give money if I have no money, I can’t give time if I have no time, I can’t give of a skill set I don’t possess, but it is also true of spiritual things. If I have no love in me I can’t give love out. If I have no emotional energy in me, I can’t give emotional energy out.

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World View – A Graph

As I often get quizzed about different world views, one rainy day I threw this together. While I acknowledge any attempt to encompass the myriad of world views in a single graph is fraught with problems, it is still a useful starting point for those lost in a miasma of thoughts. What’s My Worldview by Robert Winter is CC BY-ND 4.0.

‘God is Dead’

ICON_PLACEHOLDEREstimated reading time: 5 minutes

I know I know… you don’t need to shout it I am not so superannuated that I am deaf to your cries. Months I can hear you say, without so much as a drunken ramble or intellectual fart on this blog and then in my first two words I have blasphemed, thereby offending the bulk of the worlds population and sending that little man at the end of my road into an apoplectic spin as he lurches between picketing my drive with signs predicting hell fire will rain down on Sydney and taking matters into his own hands and immolating me on the spot, in an attempt to save mankind. The atheists among you, or those would be atheists who are too timid to actually commit to this belief for fear of social ostracism, are probably chortling into your cups.

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