Leadership beckons – and it’s looking right at you!

Forgive me for being quiet. I have a lot more to say, but I’ve burned hot for two months and that’s a long time for me to do anything without some variety.

So I’ve been playing with stories, but I don’t so much want to write them as I want to throw them off for other people to write. (If there are any actually-greedy capitalists in Hollywood, I am by now a walking benedy factory: I see my kind of stories everywhere.)

And I’ve been playing DISC games with the news, publicly on Facebook and privately with Cathleen all the time.

But mainly I’ve been trying to figure out leadership.

That’s stupid and easy, of course, but everything I think about is.

I have theory, and it’s interesting to me because it ties so much of my world together: Egoism, mothertongue, storgic love, DISC – how those all work together to make social machines work.

But I have another leadership idea gnawing at me, and I think it’s more important than the underlying theory of it all:

Leadership beckons. You walk away from the group, then turn back to face it. Then you gesture with your hand: “Come. Follow me.”

That’s the whole speech in mothertongue, with any abstract notation being redundant.

Leadership beckons. It doesn’t bellow. It doesn’t shout – or threaten. It doesn’t scold or scorn or scoff. It doesn’t bark. It doesn’t bully. It doesn’t rage.

Leadership beckons. It invites. It promotes and it promises. It welcomes. It enlists but it also enleagues and conspires and confabulates – creating its own family legend by creating its own family.

Leadership beckons. It persuades by being a family: You are not doing this for me, nor I for you, but we for us – because what’s good for us is what’s good for us.

Leadership beckons. To lead is to leave, even if no one follows. But to lead is to lead yourself to a better self – even if no one follows. So leadership beckons because what’s better for you is better for everyone you love.

Leadership beckons. Not for power, for progress. Not for profit, for enrichment. Not for control, for growth. Leadership beckons not for lucre but for love – first and best and always – failing where the loyalty borne of that love has failed.

To lead is to volunteer to fulfill a role, but to follow is to volunteer to fulfill the corresponding role. Absent force, the only thing keeping the relationship together is the shared and mutual commitment of the people making it up. If they don’t think the boss is looking out for them, they stop following him.

I have more theory here, too – how enshrining reptilian as against mammalian empathy strategies in our leadership praxis wrecks our social interactions – but we can come back to that, too.

What matters now is action.

Why?

Because leadership beckons.

The question to ask of every conflict to which you are rationally, reasonably a party is: “What’s the Ds solution?” The Ds solution is the one the leader should be taking, so you’ll be able to tell right away if you’re him. Just so you know, I have to work very hard for that guy to be me.

But in the herd of hive minds that is the Ci holiness spiral, leadership beckons, and it beckons for the Ds solution.

Lead the people you love. Lead them where? Away from the people who hate them and you and your values. You owe your enemies nothing, and you engage with them at your own peril – and to the neglect and to the peril of the people who have earned your regard.

Leadership beckons. You split yourself from the herd and you turn and you beckon and you lead love toward love for love. That’s the only reason to lead, and, accordingly, it’s the only reason anyone ever actually does lead.

But leadership beckons for your leadership – now more than ever: You know what you love – and you know that what’s good for us is what’s good for us.

Commit to that “us” and you’ll all get where you’re going.