wp06 wrote:
no disrespect to anyone but that guy is a great leader for buying a person coffee at starbucks?
what about Soldiers fighting everyday and their officers and sergeants who make life and death decisions on a daily basis. i guess the military version of leadership is on a different scale...i was suprised by the content of that article and the reaction.
i was expecting it to be a guy who did something amazing.
Hey, if you allow me to pitch in a few thoughts, I will...
The tone in the guy's story is slightly self-congratulatory, and absolutely, as you say, risking your life for your ideals and making quick decisions in a war zone is on an entirely different scale than this slightly-too-cute gratuitously "ethnicized" form of pay-it-forward.
But you know what? That's precisely the point.
This guy's actions had a ripple effect that made a whole lot of people end their day with a much happier note. And he did it
without the might of the government's funding, the Pentagon's resources, or mountains of research and technology behind him, and even more importantly,
he did it without thinking he wanted to be a leader. The best leaders just are, whether they want to be or not.
Leadership is often about what you can do in unfavorable circumstances, with inadequate information, and without external directives.
In business, you're often going to find that your division will almost never be given as much budget, time, resources, and flexibility as you would like. Someone above you doesn't care enough to tell you what they think you should do, hasn't given you enough money or time to do it, and the guys beneath you and horizontal to you are worried about their own mortgages, their daughter's dental bills, and their weight-gain. Can you turn-around angry, surly workers who are upset about their salaries into highly-motivated people who suddenly think "today is going to be a great day, let's keep it up!"? It doesn't make you a hero, it doesn't make you look like Brad Pitt, it doesn't mean you play soccer like Spain does, but I think for plenty of people in every-day America, this is what you expect out of a leader.
Further, I might add that regardless of someone's position is on America's military participation, this is precisely the kind of America that the brave men and women in Iraq want to defend. You are fighting so that other people don't have to; you're not doing that so that they can sit at home and be lazy, you're doing it so that they can enact progress, build prosperity and generate happiness. What would home be like without people's ability, willingness, and desire to try and make a positive impact on each others' lives, when the everyday frustrations mean that these two guys were about to get in a fight outside a Starbucks drive-through? If you will, that is one of the simplest differences between a prosperous society and an embittered one; a society where people still believe that it's not every man for himself out there, where people choose to share not because the government has enforced redistribution, but because they think it will lead to good. I dare say that the idea of "pursuing self-interest leads to generalized betterment for all men and women" (basically the backbone of the capitalist ethos) is present here as well; he wanted to commit a deed for himself, not for the guy behind him. In broken societies, people no longer have the will nor the power to "make things right". You must've seen yourself how fragmented societies in Iraq and Afghanistan are.
I myself live in a society where solidarity does not exist, no one tries to lend a hand to anyone else, and scuffles are common and "f*ck you if you don't look like me" is the prevalent attitude. There's no lack of money, no lack of infrastructure, no lack of technology. But there's a strong lack of leadership in ordinary men and women participating in their business, social and residential communities. Just about every community on earth could do with one more man or woman who is willing to do something nice for a jerk, in the slight off-chance that the jerk could just maybe, maybe, be transformed.
Just my $0.02.