Leadership

I try to look at things from a systems perspective when the perspective applies and helps. We often talk about a criminal justice system. If a system is a set of interacting or interdependent parts forming an integrated whole, parts not forming an integrated whole do not make up a system. Large segments of what we call our criminal justice system increasingly seems a non-system we've mislabeled out of hope or misunderstanding. On the same day I happened to read two articles. The first covered Toronto's Mayor Rob Ford, describing his apparently criminal antics including smoking crack, doing other drugs, pushing grandmothers, lying to the press, and more and the rest of the government's inability to remove him from office. For some reason it didn't…

People talk about things being right, wrong, good, or bad as if these properties had absolute or objective standards. They don't and it matters to leaders and anyone else trying to influence someone with different values. If you want to motivate someone you disagree with and you call them wrong or bad, you can bet they don't consider themselves wrong or bad. They consider themselves right and good. Your suggesting otherwise will undermine your credibility with them, no matter how good and right you feel. Without credibility, you lose your ability to motivate them. Today I'd like to undermine the universality some people imagine right, wrong, good, and bad to have beyond being opinion. Opinion is important, but we understand different people have different opinions,…