Leadership
Items on leadership and its personal and public implications
Before Clapham
Fri 30 Oct 2009 • Responses: 2 • by Cherie Harder and Peter Edman
![Photo: Colin Smith [Wikipedia], CC License](http://www.ttf.org/images/barham-court.jpg "Barham Court, Teston, Kent, UK")
The Legacy of Margaret Middleton
Lady Margaret Middleton is a nearly forgotten hero of abolition and a critical early influence on William Wilberforce through her networking, hospitality, and passion for justice.
The courage of faith
Fri 28 Aug 2009 • Responses: 2 • by Al Sikes
Reflections on the rise of Corazon Aquino
Trinity Forum Chairman Al Sikes remembers Corazon Aquino and the faith under fire that helped bring her to power.
Opening Doors
Sun 12 Jul 2009 • Responses: 2 • by Malcolm Briggs
Responding to a Cut-Flower Society
Trinity Forum Trustee Malcolm Briggs asks us to recalibrate who and what we admire.
Miller interviewed on Corporate Morality
Mon 23 Mar 2009 by TTF Staff
Senior Fellow David Miller was interviewed on March 20 by the PBS show Religion & Ethics Newsweekly. You can watch the segment and read the transcript from this link.
How can we have a culture, a corporate culture that accents character, that accents the common good and not just earnings per share or a penny more per share per quarter? That’s a new culture. Is it possible that companies can make a decent profit—create wealth, create jobs, provide goods and services for society and maybe even be a moral community to develop its people? I think it can, but it will take leadership that’s committed to a new vision.
A useful exercise for leaders
Fri 20 Mar 2009 by Peter Edman
Alan Jacobs calls our attention to the blog of Douglas Bowman, a lead designer at Google who is leaving that company. Bowman explains his rationale for moving on in a provocative post:
Without a person at (or near) the helm who thoroughly understands the principles and elements of Design, a company eventually runs out of reasons for design decisions. With every new design decision, critics cry foul. Without conviction, doubt creeps in. Instincts fail. “Is this the right move?” When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.
It would be a useful exercise to extend this argument to other fields, notably ethics. Do you find parallel situations in the organizations you lead? How important is it for to leaders to understand the principles by which their organization is run?
Are there situations where you are tempted to rely too much on data—science, polls, market “demands,” what is technically possible—to take the “subjective” factors out of the decision and make sure no one is ultimately responsible for a decision. Is this what causes a “corporate mindset”?
By what standards do you evaluate criticism of yourself or your organization? How do you help other people in your organization understand core principles, whether ethical, operational, or aesthetic?
McClay on Lincoln
Wed 11 Feb 2009 by TTF Staff
Senior Fellow Wilfred M. McClay has the cover story for the January/February 2009 issue of Humanities, the magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The piece is titled “Lincoln the Great (Though He Didn’t Look That Way at the Time).”
In the 1950s, this country-boy Lincoln had morphed into the wise, prudent leader who steered the ship of Union between the wild excesses of ideologues: abolitionists on the left and proslavery fire-eaters on the right. In the 1960s, Lincoln was at first thought of as a civil-rights pioneer, but soon became criticized, even reviled, as a racist and a proponent of timid half-measures, a forerunner of the pragmatic liberalism that was so thoroughly drubbed by the New Left. Today, Lincoln is revered for his combination of faith and epistemological modesty, a skeptical believer who sought to do God’s will without ever claiming to know it—a view that requires one to overlook the fierce and relentless way he conducted the war that defined his presidency.
We too will have our own Lincoln, or Lincolns, and there is good reason to believe that ours will be as partial as anyone else’s. But we should not be content with such easy relativism. Out of respect to the man, we should at least try to recover a sense of both the grandeur and the contingency of the history that he lived through, and helped to shape.
Inaugural Day 2009
Fri 23 Jan 2009 • Responses: 1 • by Al Sikes
The opportunity for more than a transitional moment
Trinity Forum Chairman Al Sikes reflects on the Obama Inauguration.
Obama’s Challenges Overseas
Tue 23 Dec 2008 by David Aikman
It’s likely that historians will view the 2008 election as a moment when America turned inward and looked hard at what was going on inside the country. Many recently-elected presidents have taken office with a decidedly strong pre-occupation with foreign affairs: Richard Nixon was one, and George H. W. Bush another. Both men, incidentally, accomplished major things in foreign affairs but were tripped up by American domestic developments.
Where No One Sees
Tue 09 Dec 2008 • Responses: 1 • by Sir Richard Dannatt
Character and Leadership in an Age of Image
An address by General Sir Richard Dannatt, KCB CBE MC ADC Gen, at an event at Rhodes House, Oxford, sponsored by the Trinity Forum Europe.
Odysseus and the Seduction of Leadership
Wed 03 Dec 2008 • Responses: 1 • by Paul Vanderbroeck
What should drive your choices?
Executive coach Paul Vanderbroek takes another look at Odysseus. Together the Iliad and the Odyssey tell us a story of a young high-potential leader who let himself be seduced into leaving wife and family to embark on what seemed to be a noble project . . .
