Solitude in Leadership

There is clearly a crisis in leadership and what do you think might help? Solitude - introspection, knowing yourself. This isn't easy in today's world and this speaker at West Point, of all places, makes many surprising points for why and how it can be done.

Crisis in leadership is evident and West Point is perhaps an unlikely place to find a mentioning of need for solitude in leadership, but in a speech to the new cadettes, an address speaks of such things as "thinking for yourself, finding your own reality" versus "marinating yourself in conventional wisdom of the day." He speaks of hearing your own voice. It's hard today in corporate world and government bureaucracies to be anything but good sheep keeping status quo. The need for introspection, self knowing and what he points to but doesn't say is the need for understanding the role of value dynamics in thinking. This might be where the real crisis is. We, living organisms make choices by what we have come to value. If you value multi-tasking it keeps you from thinking long enough to develop your own ideas and in short thinking for yourself. You cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time say on Twitter or Facebook. You can clearly see value dynamics in social networking as likes attract likes. What we value shows up in who we are following, what we are sharing. That's why data is being collected from these networks for data mining somewhere in marketing think tanks. So take a bit of time to think for yourself and read this article. You just might come away with an original idea you can use being a leader in your life, in whatever place you find yourself. www.theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership