Last Sunday, February 6, 2011, America celebrated President Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday. The media was full of tributes to our 40th President. It was awe-inspiring to watch and read the many stories and celebrations of Reagan’s life and leadership. He is my favorite modern president, so I found myself wanting to honor him appropriately.
Sometimes it feels like I need trifocals for my mind. That’s because I often have to focus on three different time-horizons simultaneously – past, present, and future. Success in most professional endeavors requires the right combination of leadership, management, and administration. By leadership, I mean the ability to look ahead and to imagine and articulate a future state. More than that, it is about getting others to see the goodness and wisdom of the future we aspire to. It is about helping them see that this future is achievable and worthy of investment and commitment. Management, on the other hand, is about seeing and dealing with the here and now. It is about ensuring that our work will enable us to achieve the future we desire. Lastly, administration is about the past. It is about reviewing results to ensure that we are achieving objects on our path towards our short and long-term goals and ambitions.
Why is that we feel compelled to take words that mean one thing and twist them to mean something completely different? In my youth, somehow the word “bad” came to mean “good.” Today, I hear kids using the word “sick” to mean “great” or “awesome.” This isn’t simply a practice reserved for the young. I recently came across a word that connotes something radically different from the definitions we find in the dictionary. The word is “visionary.”
Today, as we commemorate and celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., it is important to contemplate the impact that his life and leadership had on each of us. I consider my generation to be fairly enlightened in terms of race relations, certainly more enlightened than my parents’ and grandparents’ generations. I have close friends, colleagues, neighbors – even a president – of races different from my own. These relationships never seemed unusual or surprising. In fact, I have always taken race relations for granted. As the son of a United States Naval officer, I grew up seeing leaders of color as a normal and expected thing.
We can find wisdom anywhere we look. Sometimes we don’t even have to look that hard. It just jumps up and smacks us in the head. One of my favorite sources is comic strips. For me, The Far Side is a constant spring of priceless life lessons. One of my father’s favorite quotes came from Walt Kelly’s cartoon, Pogo, which originated in 1948. Pogo, the title character said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” While it may be grammatically imperfect, the wisdom is flawless.