Thoughts from Harvard

"Increasingly, leaders want not just to run an organization effectively, but to change the surrounding system as well. Not just improve hospital performance, but improve overall health. Not just fix troubled schools, but change patterns in communities that lead children to under-perform. Not just fix a problem, like a broken financial system, but change the culture.

Such challenging goals require leaders to operate in areas where the pathways aren't paved, and the moves aren't already choreographed. This calls for not just great leadership, but advanced leadership.

Advanced leaders work in complex systems where authority is diffuse or divided. Many people are in charge of parts, but no one is responsible for the whole. Goals are unclear or conflicting. There are multiple stakeholders with divergent interests. Outcomes are notoriously hard to measure. Barriers to change appear everywhere. In short, it's like dancing when you can't see forward and your shoes are uncomfortable.

Still, advanced leaders dance to their own tune. They find opportunities for change in the cracks in the system, in the white space where nothing is written. Rather than try to change the establishment all at once, they fill gaps, create new alliances, and forge new pathways."

-Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business Review

New Media, New Future

"In my opinion, this is a new ecosystem emerging in media, between the so-called traditional media and the new media. And this new ecosystem is not based on competition and who is going to win, it's based on complementing each other. When our correspondents were banned, we had thousands of correspondents through these activists." Wadah Khanfar, director general of Al Jazeera, on interaction with social media. (New York Times)

What am I getting myself into here?

Seeking Unity.. .

Lord.. .

Unify my life. Bring together scholarship with practice. Consolidate my contexts with my vocation. Let my character and principles define my teaching, preaching, and organizing for both present challenges and future generations. Guide me to avoid the urgent and the good in order to invest in the timely and the best. Become present again my my heart, mind, and vision so that I may be both wholly me and wholly yours.

Amen

Sunday Morning

I thought I head You whisper to me this morning.
In between the plucking of violin strings and gentle drum beats,
to melodies that have lost their fragrance, but not their charm.
In between scripture, greek vocabulary, jokes about old cars.
These age old truths and freshly decorated principles stuffed in goat skins ready to explode and spill out all over the newly mopped floors of the old, trendy Baltimore warehouse.
Just a faint, small voice.
It didn't sound like my normal, doubting self.
Soft but assured, confident beyond my wildest dreams.
Even as my faith fails me, the age-old questions rediscover themselves again and again.
I commit and doubt, re-commit and take another step toward candle lit alters.
But it always feels like several steps back into the mist, damp and humid.
It's like condensation on the windows of my soul.
Every time I wipe it clear, it just fogs up again.
The voice draws pictures like the finger of a child.
They were silly images and ideas floating about my soft, impressionable brain.
Intimate homes amongst grand cathedrals.
I am speaking Words I barely believe in,
to crowds I am typically captive to by impression and reputation.
But as I speak, the Words come to life,
and I am not afraid.
I feel full, connected, and integrated.
My tenderness and sensitivities are strength.
The crowds build bridges upon them,
to one another,
and to God.
Seconds later, the vision is fuzzy again.
As I doubt my doubts again and again.
How long will I ignore this?
How long shall I doubt?
How long will I flip these possibilities over?

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A Prisoner's Love

"Throughout all these years that I have lived without freedom, our love was full of bitterness imposed by outside circumstances, but as I savor its aftertaste, it remains boundless. I am serving my sentence in a tangible prison, while you wait in the intangible prison of the heart. Your love is the sunlight that leaps over high walls and penetrates the iron bars of my prison window, stroking every inch of my skin, warming every cell of my body, allowing me to always keep peace, openness, and brightness in my heart, and filling every minute of my time in prison with meaning. My love for you, on the other hand, is so full of remorse and regret that it at times makes me stagger under its weight. I am an insensate stone in the wilderness, whipped by fierce wind and torrential rain, so cold that no one dares touch me. But my love is solid and sharp, capable of piercing through any obstacle. Even if I were crushed into powder, I would still use my ashes to embrace you."

-Liu Xiaobo, "I Have No Enemies: My Final Statement"

Nonsense

13 murders since the new year began within 485 square miles
these numbers mean nothing
statistical nonsense
the police shoot one another on the streets outside the club.