Managing Leadership^®

We are approaching what is becoming acknowledged as the anniversary of the “beginning” of the current financial crisis that began in the US – according to the conventional wisdom, with the fall of Lehman Brothers on 15 September 2008 – and which has since swept around the world. And what a year this event has ushered in, and what changes it has wrought!

These have not, of course, been limited to finance, economics, or even business. They have extended well into politics and how we view and organize our societies. And the avalanche of transformations thus set loose continues to gather into itself additional spheres of our lives – and to build up greater and more irresistible momentum.

That should be alarming enough. But more frightening still surely is our sheepish acquiescence to the claim that the nature of this crisis lies essentially in a failure of expertise and oversight, and – so the critics also painstakingly emphasize – in an ill-advised overreliance on unregulated free-market philosophy in too many aspects of our business and, indeed, our personal activities and choices.

Perhaps the real source of this problem doesn’t reside in technical factors – their complexity or their management by technocrats – at all. Is it not possible that it centers, rather, on our abandonment of responsibility and thought to a class of “leaders” who we are led to believe alone possess the ability to administer the world? At all levels, we submit to the superior wisdom, insight, and character of our superiors. We, for just one example, buy their too-good-to-be-true mortgages, we sell them, we design them, we repackage and sell them again as risk-management tools – and we all at each floor in this house of cards do it heedlessly of our own close-minded complicity in our own ruin.

If we cling to this view of the way the world works, then we can indeed use that unstable ground to encourage us to build yet another insubstantial structure upon it. We can blame the leaders and experts for lacking sufficient leadership and expertise, and continue the search for ever greater beings to whom we can surrender ever more of our freedom over – and of our responsibility for – our own lives.

This crisis did not begin on 15 September 2008 with any particular regulatory error or oversight. Moreover, the lessons to be drawn from it are not those indicated in this Forbes.com article commemorating its putative anniversary. Rather, while the crisis may go into remission, it will not end as long as we continue to look for specific top-down decisions or macro-policies on defined calendar dates.

It will only begin to end when we reclaim and exercise our own judgment – in our private lives, at work, in our communities, and in our societies. The leaders and experts and their technocratic macro-remedies being pushed on us as solutions to this crisis were its cause, and more of them will hardly be its solution.

Only we can fix the problems that are, in truth, of our own making. So, if anyone needs to step up, it’s us. We’ll be taking a look at how to do – and how to facilitate – that in the coming days. Please be sure to stop in!

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Today’s tips: Speaking of exercising mature, responsible, and deliberative control rather than surrendering passively to the machinations of the mighty, please see this thought-provoking item by Mary Jo Asmus – read the comments as well (and thanks to Steve Roesler for the tip).

And speaking of concisely identifying causes and effects – and solutions – please be sure to see this classic Dave Barry column memorably demonstrating key parts of the problems we experience today.

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