simplification

it's raining and i'm wandering philly for the next 6 hours w/ all my luggage in tow. luckily i've found some refuge in a coffee shop and free wifi.

if i were to reduce life down to a single focus i would say that it's all about self-discovery/formation (i'm not the only to say this, and certainly not the first). Bill and i conversed about this last night and it reminded of this paper i wrote for the last Etrek class. it was encouraging to hear his thoughts. here's an excerpt from the paper i wrote:

one of the critiques that postmodernism makes is that roles or definitions are incongruent with life and the way we experience it. To lay out a philosophy of postmodernism leadership could be seen as a going against the very thing that postmodernism is reacting to. Of course that is a self-refuting statement in that by making the very statement you are indeed promoting a philosophy of leadership. I think though that what postmodernism would offer is, rather than a philosophy of leadership it would be a philosophy of life so to speak and from that a priori philosophy all other aspects would sprout. A philosophy of self discovery is by no means a new development with postmodernism and using this as a spring board to develop further ideals for specific topics is exactly what the Enlightenment did only from a different vantage point...............
The Enlightenment (post-medievalism) sought to redefine how people found their respective identity and postulated that that occurred in allowing the person to be an autonomous individual. From this basic stance modernism set the stage for the rest of its various outlooks and theories. One of those being the position of leader, where the climax seemed to be how clearly you could define a vision and get a group of people together to join in fulfilling that vision. Vision and mission statements were the mantra of the modern leadership ideal, and your success at defining a vision, communicating it, and seeing it come to fruition determined your success as a leader.
In the current shift that is taking place postmodernism seeks to once again redefine how the individual seeks to answer the question “Who am I?” from the context we currently find ourselves immersed in. The basic premise in postmodernity is that we are inseparable from our context and those we interact with and that the notion of autonomy was ludicrous. It's only from within our social interaction that we learn who we are. From here defining leadership becomes a paradox to the postmodern mindset. If everything is contextualized and based upon relationship how is it that we can layout an overarching philosophy of leadership? What is the underlying necessity to define a philosophy for leadership? I think that perhaps what lies underneath is the need to define the role/position/notion of a leader so that we can then move ourselves into that mold or learn those principles so as to increase our potential as a leader.



going back to roles/positions:
We talked about the concept of the "project has the power" rather than an individual. think about that for a minute. the project determines when meetings need to be called, and the project determines roles of those involved. rather than predefined roles there is now a pool of people with certain talents and depending the project different people get involved. stripping people of roles and titles has interesting implications. given our titles/roles i believe we feel the need to create projects because I have this role or that role. without a role/position this disppears and what we're left with is only the projects that need to be there.continue reading