A call for mindful leadership

I have long been a fan of Ellen Langer and reviewed her book The Power Of Mindful Learning in my August 2000 knowledge letter. And more recently I wrote a little about her most recent book Counterclockwise.

But here is a recent article of hers A Call for Mindful Leadership. This is how she summarises:

In sum, there is no best way to do anything independent of context, so the leader cannot have privileged information. When leaders keep everyone in their place with the illusion of knowability and possession of this privileged knowledge the benefit to them is that we "obey" and leaders feel superior. The cost is that they create lemmings. Their mindlessness promotes our own mindlessness which costs us our well being and health. Net result, the leader, the led, and the company all lose.

Credit: Ellen Langer

This is all about knowledge management! We all need to be more mindful. Take a look at Ellen's two books that I reference above and you will start to see the importance of message!