Is a shorter attention span increasing our creativity?
What style of leadership is more likely to be emulated?
10/21/2010
Lebron James, Mahatma Gandhi, Warren Buffet, Mark Zuckenberg, Andrew Carnegie, etc? Do people want to emulate you more when they see you as financially successful or is a person who is altruistic more likely to be emulated? Recently a visitor from Uganda spoke to one of my classes. Beatrice had risen from being one of eighteen children in a family, from being a woman who could not own property to someone who has a school and is a leader in the community and is a strong promoter of women’s education and women’s rights. During her lecture I continued to wonder how success and being a community leader had transformed her lifestyle and how were her living standards in comparison to her local community? Does she now live in a larger house? Does she own a nice car? Or does she live a frugal lifestyle? Then, the following question was, how did her lifestyle affect impact her community and how did they want to emulate her? Did they now want to go to college, own a businesses, and what lifestyle she thought was more likely to motivate her peers to study and improve their living standards by focusing on their education and the education of their daughters? While I did not ask the question in class, I asked it later at a group meeting. The group found the question interesting and one of my colleagues mentioned that despite having long talks with people in Kenya about how they could themselves improve their standard of living, the local people did not associate his father’s success with working hard but rather with marrying a fair skin woman and moving to the United States. They believe that by moving to America they could also achieve this level of success.
