future

Eight Ideas for Future Leadership

I just finished the fascinating book, Leaders Make the Future: Ten New Leadership Skills for an Uncertain Future. Brilliant, bold, wise, stimulating, and a worthwhile map for the skills needed for an uncertain future. Early in the book, Johansen provides eight themes or insights that will be true for future leaders. These are NOT the ten skills, but rather, core themes that will be manifest in those who lead for the future. Here they are.

ONE
Get there early. Be among the first to show up. Don't be premature, but hesitation and later adoption is not going to serve leaders for the future. Faith, foresight, risk-taking, curiosity, and the mindset of explorers and adventurers is needed.

Leadership Lesson 04:
Leaders spend a good deal of their time living in the future.

That is the reality! Leaders live in the future. Well, they are least rent an apartment there which they visit quite often! For fruitful visionary leadership, leaders must know how to stay energized and stay up-to-date and in touch with the emerging future. Leaders live with a balancing act, where they live in the future as they lead in the present. The only way to continually see a better future, is by seeing it. How do you see it? You see it by being there to look around.

Leadership Lesson 04: Facing the Future
Being forward looking is THE quality that most separates leaders from followers.

If there is one thing that is most often talked about, it is visionary leadership. Sometimes I think it is the MAIN thing that is said to define leaders. What I so respect about Kouzes and Posner, is they know great leadership requires many components. And in that larger vision, they give the rightful place of vision and seeing a better future.

WHAT KEEPS YOU GOING . . . Into the Future?

The future is shaped my men and women
with a steady, even zestful confidence
that on balance their efforts will not have been in vain.
John Gardner

I used this thought from John Gardner in a recent lesson on the power of hope and vital optimism.  Leaders are those who have the privilege and responsibility of shaping the future, to a greater degree than others.