As anyone who cares about aesthetics and the arts should, I tend to be very critical about contemporary art installations. They run the gamut from self-serving, lazy garbage to absolutely brilliant pieces that reflect a deep contemplation of the self and humanity.
Yayoi Kusama’s “Obliteration Room” at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art is the latter. Definitely worth a look.
All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
We’re more connected now than ever before, thanks to the internet and social technologies. But how does that impact our physical interactions and traditional methods of collaboration?
“The Third Place is a concept of Ray Oldenburg, urban sociologist and author of The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. The First Place is your home, and the Second Place is your office. You have assigned roles and tasks at each place, and you know nearly all the people in each. The Third Place is where you meet with people you don’t know that well, or maybe at all, and you exchange ideas, learn about other people, and, as Oldenburg sees it, enrich society and yourself.”
December has arrived, which means a host of internet entities will be dropping end-of-the-year data on us as the month rolls toward its inevitable conclusion and into 2012. Twitter has been fairly quick to the draw, and is already on the third of five entries in its 2011 Year In Review.
The first two pieces cataloged the major stories that flashed through its stream and the deluge of new high-profile users the service has taken on in the previous eleven months. Both of these lists are interesting to at least a fleeting degree, but the good stuff is in the third entry, Hot Topics, which was released today.
The trendiest food topic this year? McLobster. World news story? Mubarak’s resignation. And then there’s the top hashtags for the year, those indicators of Twitter power-use. We were given the following:
Not everyone needs to be a leader.
Forget what college ad campaigns have told you, society has convinced you of, and your parents hoped you would be. We’re not all cut out to be leaders (at least not all the time), and that’s a good thing.
Disturbing, I know.
It’s been drilled into our heads that true success is largely the result of leadership capability. The thing is, if every person were to be a leader, we would go nowhere as a society. Personal agendas would govern each individual’s actions and teamwork would be impossible. And with the absence of teamwork, we lose the capability to achieve truly important goals. The saying goes “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” I’d add that Rome also wasn’t built exclusively by Caesars with big egos doing their own thing.
I can guarantee that there were a lot of exceptionally smart, talented, and successful future Romans who knew how and whom to follow. Those people may have been leaders in their own right, given particular situations. That’s what makes good teamwork so dynamic—if leaders are willing to follow team members who are more qualified to lead particular tasks, the probability of overall success for the greater objective is bound to be higher. Being a good leader is often about being able to be a good follower. It’s about having the flexibility—and the reason—to step aside and let someone else take the reigns when it benefits the team.
Pretty simple, right?
Yet in business, we inevitably stumble when it comes to how we approach leadership. How many people would rate their “leadership skills” as “high” if their boss gave them a survey on the topic? I’m guessing nearly everyone. But why? We rush to be team leaders when the “opportunity” arises—regardless of how well we know we would lead a given project—because we believe that showing leadership (or at least the willingness to lead) is what will propel our careers forward. As one can imagine, this propensity and eagerness to be a leader in any situation can be extremely detrimental to a team. Aside from the inevitable animosity and jealousy fuming from the team members who also wanted to show-off their leadership abilities, chances are pretty high that the eager volunteer just isn’t the right person to lead in that situation.
It’s an unfortunate side-effect of how we’re indoctrinated in much of Western society. How many college brochures say something to the effect of “We help build the leaders of tomorrow”? We’re told from a very early age that leadership is what “makes a man” (whatever that means) and that if we fail to be great leaders at some point in our lives, we’re not all that important in the grand scheme of things.
That’s a load of bull.
Next time you’re in a team situation where a leader must emerge, think critically about the role before you push everyone aside to take it. Should you be the leader? Is the team better served by your skills if you are not burdened with that responsibility?
Sheep photo courtesy of mouton.rebelle.
Read the original post at PLOS Blogs here.
Susan Kare was the icon designer for the original Apple Macintosh. Her designs literally changed the face of personal computing.
