Evolutionary Leadership Quotes

You are not alone in the struggles of life. Entire cosmos is with you. It evolves through the way you face and overcome challenges of life. Use everything in your advantage.

I am no feminist. Even though the term "feminism" is founded upon the basic principle of gender equality, it possesses its own fundamental gender bias, which makes it inclined towards the wellbeing of women, over the wellbeing of the whole society. And if history has shown anything, it is that such fundamental biases in time corrupt even the most glorious ideas and give birth to prejudice, bigotry and differentiation.

Transforming a team, let alone an entire organisation, from the principles of command and control to those based on servant-leadership, from plans based on prediction to plans based on empirical, evolutionary data requires both patience and tenacity.

Exchanging the old boss for a new boss is not situational leadership. True situational leadership—flexible, effective, evolutionary—can only arise from self-management. And that means that situational leadership doesn’t change fundamentally with circumstances. It is always about giving up control.

The efficiency of the hospital was a perfect illustration of Dunbar’s number – that magic number of 150. The size of our brain, Robin Dunbar, an eminent evolutionary anthropologist at Oxford University, has argued (and the brain size of other primates), is determined by the size of our ‘natural’ social group, when humans and their brains evolved in small hunting and gathering groups. We have the largest brains among primates, and the largest social group. We can relate to about 150 people on an informal, personal basis, but beyond that leadership, impersonal rules and job descriptions become necessary. So

I will begin by describing the nature of an emotional regression and showing how in any society, no matter how advanced its state of technology, chronic anxiety can induce an approach to life that is counter-evolutionary. One does not need dictators in order to create a totalitarian (that, is totalistic) society. Then, employing five characteristics of chronically anxious personal families, I will illustrate how those same characteristics are manifest throughout the greater American family today, demonstrating their regressive effects on the thinking and functioning, the formation and the expression, of leadership among parents and presidents. Those five characteristics are:    1. Reactivity: the vicious cycle of intense reactions of each member to events and to one another.    2. Herding: a process through which the forces for togetherness triumph over the forces for individuality and move everyone to adapt to the least mature members.    3. Blame displacement: an emotional state in which family members focus on forces that have victimized them rather than taking responsibility for their own being and destiny.    4. A quick-fix mentality: a low threshold for pain that constantly seeks symptom relief rather than fundamental change.    5. Lack of well-differentiated leadership: a failure of nerve that both stems from and contributes to the first four. To

The difference between a dictator and a true leader, is in intention. Given enough resources anybody can manipulate the minds of the masses and become their chosen authority, for the masses rarely look past the veil of the candidate's charm. And this is more evident today than ever, as a psychologically unfit misogynistic bully has swayed his way into the oval office with nothing but charm and charisma. So, basically we live in a society where a bully can become the authority of a great nation, the history of which is filled with true leaders who were the forerunners of humanitarian glory and real progress - these leaders were not simply the leaders of a country, or a party, but they were and still remain in the heart of the civilized humans as the leaders of humanity. They were the torch-bearers of egalitarianism and their light spread across the globe and touched countless lives with the warmth of humaneness. They lived among the masses but they didn't let the prejudices of the masses become their own, let alone infect the masses with more prejudices, unlike today's so-called leadership in America. They made America truly a great nation, by turning it into a symbol of liberty and acceptance, and today that very greatness is at stake, as the primitive evils of prejudices and discriminations have once again begun to creep into its backbone, through the words and actions of its very so-called leader. This is not a threat to democracy, for democracy itself at our current evolutionary stage, is a threat to our progress, rather it is a threat to the heritage of every single act of kindness, reasoning and acceptance ever committed in the history of humanity. The masses are existentially allowed to talk nonsense and advocate prejudices, but when an authority of the masses begins to talk nonsense and advocate prejudice and bigotry, it is an existential crisis for not just those masses but all humans around the world, with implications of catastrophic proportions. A leader is to take away prejudices from the psychological edifice of a country - a leader is to uplift a country, that is, a people, while warming their minds with the gentle flames of love, acceptance and reasoning. In fact, that's the only kind of true leadership there is, rest are just uncivilized tribalism that brings along more and more conflicts in the heart of the people within a country as well as outside of it.

Remember, real change is actually evolutionary; small victories through implementation of well thought out ideas, changes cultures over time. Implement the ideas in this book, one step at a time, with the overarching outcome to develop others to carry on what you started. Before that man or women walked out the door on their shift, did you ask “could I have done more to prepare them for what they may encounter?

Public sector leaders, with the counsel and cooperation of private sector experts, can and must choose a game to invest in and then let the evolutionary pressures of market competition determine who wins within that game...effective government entities pick games. They issue grand challenges. They catalyse the formation of markets, and use public capital to leverage private capital. A nation can't "drift" to leadership. Some strong public hand is needed to point the market's hidden hand in a particular direction.

People are innately prepared to act as members of tribes, but culture tells us how to recognize who belongs to our tribes, what schedules of aid, praise, and punishment are due to tribal fellows, and how the tribe is to deal with other tribes — allies, enemies, and clients. […] Contemporary human societies differ drastically from the societies in which our social instincts evolved. Pleistocene hunter-gatherer societies were likely comparatively small, egalitarian, and lacking in powerful institutionalized leadership. […] To evolve largescale, complex social systems, cultural evolutionary processes, driven by cultural group selection, takes advantage of whatever support these instincts offer. […] cultural evolution must cope with a psychology evolved for life in quite different sorts of societies. Appropriate larger scale institutions must regulate the constant pressure from smaller-groups (coalitions, cabals, cliques), to subvert the large-group favoring rules. To do this cultural evolution often makes use of “work arounds” — mobilizing tribal instincts for new purposes. For example, large national and international (e.g. great religions) institutions develop ideologies of symbolically marked inclusion that often fairly successfully engage the tribal instincts on a much larger scale. Military and religious organizations (e.g., Catholic Church), for example, dress recruits in identical clothing (and haircuts) loaded with symbolic markings, and then subdivide them into small groups with whom they eat and engage in long-term repeated interaction. Such work-arounds are often awkward compromises […] Complex societies are, in effect, grand natural social-psychological experiments that stringently test the limits of our innate dispositions to cooperate.

Conservatives will demand loyalty to their in-group, and once conflict begins, they will also demand subservience to leadership, so long as the leadership appears to be attempting to win the conflict or competition, and acting with their group's best interests at heart. Liberals,

we are predisposed to trust and have an evolutionary need to do so. Therefore, people are motivated to overlook a violation of trust

Beyond the cultural differences that must be bridged in any international effort, combined with factors of national politics, priorities, and values, we continue to grapple with the essential paradox of public health that began our discussion: when the system is working effectively, it is a silent venture and there are relatively few outbreaks of disease. These very successes lead most of us down a complacent path of false confidence, apathy, and assumptions that the endless dance is over. To complicate matters further, microbes themselves are hardly monolithic or permanently settled beings. For every attempt we make to destroy or weaken them, they respond with an equal and opposite force. The goal of both sides is to assume leadership of the evolutionary waltz ever in progress.

General Gray, the 29th Commandant of the Marine Corps, characterized this evolutionary development this way: You have to understand Maneuver Warfare is really a thought process.... So it was much more of an impact and it is probably not even a good name but that’s what we gave it. The point is, it was all about empowering people and letting people do what they think they had to do, letting people make mistakes and so on, so they learn, and that was one of the big leadership parts of the maneuver thought process. The empowerment of people, and the idea of decentralization, in other words, maybe decentralizing operations so the intent is to understand two echelons up, and two echelons down, that type of thing. So that thought process is very, very important. I think that we in essence turned the Marine Corp loose. So the Marine Corp really did it. I just let them do it. 7

To make any vision a reality, a mission leader needs the confidence in herself to persist regardless of the naysayers. She needs the will to persevere when obstacles seem insurmountable.

A mission leader recognizes that while she can progress independently, momentum only occurs when people align with, act on, and amplify a message. The amplification makes a messenger’s mission multiply and eventually creates a movement worth following.

A mission leader listens, and as a consequence, is heard. She has the power to mobilize people who are engaged or to bring those who hide in dark corners into the light.

By the term regression I mean to convey something far more profound than a mere loss of progress. Societal regression is about the perversion of progress into a counter-evolutionary mode. In a societal regression, evolutionary principles of life that have been basic to the development of our species become distorted, perverted, or actually reversed. Chief among those evolutionary principles are:    self-regulation of instinctual drive;    adaptation to strength rather than weakness;    a growth-producing response to challenge;    allowing time for maturing processes to evolve; and    the preservation of individuality and integrity. Emotional regression, therefore, is more of a “going down” than a “going back”; it is devolution rather than evolution. It has to do with a lowering of maturity, rather than a reduction in the gross national product. One needs to view societal regression in three dimensions, not two. At the same time that a society is “pro-gressing” technologically it can be “re-gressing” emotionally.

The more my perspective broadened, the more confirmed I became in my view that contemporary leadership dilemmas have less to do with the specificity of given problems, the nature of a particular technique, or the makeup of a given group than with the way everyone is framing the issues. In addition, I began to realize that this similarity in thinking processes had to do with regressive (in the sense of counter-evolutionary) emotional processes that could be found everywhere. Nor did gender, race, or ethnicity seem to make a difference in the strength or the effects of these processes.

In the pages that follow I will show that America’s leadership rut has both a conceptual and an emotional dimension that reinforce one another. The conceptual dimension is the inadequacy of what I shall refer to as the social science construction of reality. This construction fails to explain these emotional processes, much less to offer leaders a way of gaining some separation from their regressive influence. The emotional dimension is the chronic anxiety that currently ricochets from sea to shining sea. However, the word emotional as used throughout this work is not to be equated with feelings, which are a later evolutionary development. While it includes feelings, the word refers primarily to the instinctual side of our species that we share in common with all other forms of life. By

Thought leadership is by nature evolutionary, in that it must always be part of an ever-evolving flow.

People trust you when you are genuine and authentic, not an imitation … You need to be who you are, not try to emulate somebody else … Leaders are defined by their unique life stories and the way they frame their stories to discover their passions and the purpose of their leadership.

It is nevertheless true that the change itself has become unpredictable and evolutionary, as compared to treading through carefully.

Desperate to join the medical mainstream, psychiatry recognized that its diagnostic system was grossly inadequate. For instance, in the 1968 second edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-II), depressive neurosis was defined as “An excessive reaction of depression due to an internal conflict or to an identifiable event such as the loss of a love object or cherished possession.”4 Is moderate depression a week after the loss of a favorite cat “excessive”? One diagnostician would say, “No, not at all, people love their cats”; another, “After a week, it is obviously excessive!” Such disagreements made psychiatry’s scientific aspirations laughable. The solution was a radical revision, DSM-III, published in 1980.5 Written by a task force of the American Psychiatric Association under the leadership of psychiatry researcher Robert Spitzer, it purged psychoanalytic theory from DSM-II and replaced its 134 pages of clinical impressions describing 182 disorders with 494 pages of symptom checklists that defined 265 disorders. “Depressive neurosis” was eliminated. The definition of a new diagnosis, “major depressive disorder,” said nothing about internal conflict; it only required the presence of at least five of nine possible symptoms for at least two weeks. Every diagnosis was now defined by a checklist of necessary and sufficient symptoms. DSM-III transformed psychiatry.6 It made possible standardized interviews that epidemiologists could use to measure the prevalence of specific disorders.