A Failure of Empathy and the Preposterous Notion of 197 Shootings in Legislatures in the First 18 Years of This Century

"We all are born with a certain package. We are who we are: where we were born, who we were born as, how we were raised. We're kind of stuck inside that person, and the purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize a little bit with other people. And for me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy. It lets you understand a little bit more about different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us."

- Robert Ebert, film critic

There have been 197 school shootings in the first 206 months of this century. Congress has not passed a single piece of legislation in response to the fact that more than 3 people are being shot in schools - more than one of them killed - each month. 

It is true that this problem of shootings in America is complicated. It is also true that high school students feel that trigonometry is complicated and yet we - rightfully - force them to work on trig problems. Shootings are complicated but not more than any of thousands of problems that are given out each day to millions of students. We ask them to solve these problems because it will make them better. 

A failure of empathy is the root of Congress's lack of response to this carnage. Let's do a simple thought experiment, changing out schools for legislatures.

There have been 197 shootings in legislative bodies in the first 206 months of this century. Congress has not passed a single piece of legislation in response to the fact that more than 3 people are being shot in congress - more than one of them killed - each month.

Does anyone believe that the above paragraph could ever exist in the real world? After just 19 shootings in legislatures - 19 stories about congresspeople rather than students or legislative aides rather than teachers - does anyone believe that new laws would not quickly be passed?

Maybe the most essential feature of any leaders is empathy. What help would you need if your mom were single and poor and you had no access to mentors? What help would you need if you were an aspiring entrepreneur without access to mentors? What would it be like to be faced with the prospect of 30 years of commuting an hour each way to work? What would it be like to be on your third military deployment in two years? Leaders who make communities happier places are leaders who can empathize with people they are not and understand what would help.

In no small part because our legislators cannot understand what it would be like to go to work each week wondering if theirs will be the legislative body where the one congressperson will go berserk and begin shooting, or where some madman with an AR-15 will walk into the deliberative chambers to begin systematically shooting helpless, frightened congresspeople, they will not do a thing for our students and teachers. "Women and children first," is not a phrase heard on this ship of state.

A terribly conservative friend who loves Trump told me that what he likes best about him is that "Trump's a fighter." I guess one emphasis for leadership would be to find someone who fights, even though most of the people he fights with are fellow Americans. For me, I like the idea of empathetic leaders.

Bill Bishop on How the Real Failure of Leadership is That No One Follows Anymore

Presidential candidates and op-ed writers often lament the lack of leaders, as if entire generations of Americans were born without the skills of a Johnson, a Franklin D. Roosevelt, or a Dwight D. Eisenhower. There are, of course, just as many leaders as there have always been.  What the country is missing is old fashioned followers. The generations that emerged in the last half of the twentieth century lost trust in every vestige of hierarchical authority, from the edicts of Catholic bishops to the degrees of Free Masons to the stature of federal representatives. There haven’t been any new LBJs because the whole notion of leadership has changed – and the whole shape of democracy is changing.

- Bill Bishop from his book, The Big Sort

Obama Finally Gets His Experience Just as His Support Dries Up

Leadership does not just begin with vision. It begins with getting people to confront the brutal facts and to act on the implications.
- Jim Collins, Good to Great

Again, I feel like a Martian. I’m not sure whether to feel comforted by that or not.
When Bush invaded Iraq, I was aghast twice. Once that he’d do it in response to 9-11 and then that so many people – from media to everyday citizens – would so blithely cheer him on.

A year ago, when Obama was sworn in, I was, like so many Americans, so relieved that Bush was gone and happy to have a new president who seemed so intelligent, thoughtful, and carefully optimistic. The one big concern I expressed at the time was that Obama had no real experience. A year ago, I felt like a part of the majority. It was a little heady.

After peaking in the summer, Obama’s approval ratings have steadily dropped. They are now below 50%. And this is the part that I don’t get.

Obama’s one big weakness last year was a lack of experience. He now has it. And he’s done pretty well. I’ve got criticisms of the man, but he’s largely the cautiously progressive, boldly moderate candidate we elected. He’s kept his calm. He’s put money into infrastructure and education, showing his commitment to making long-term improvements in this country. And he’s shown genuine respect for other countries and won back our standing in the world community. He’s changed tactics, strategy, and even specifics about his goal on health care but has yet to sacrifice direction (moving towards more coverage for more Americans).

I’m still hopeful about this man who writes about the audacity of hope, but now I feel a little less uneasy about him. In my book, he’s proven that he can translate his potential into results. He has experience and the experience is not that bad, in spite of the bad economy and wars he’s inherited.

Bush had a great imagination. I’ll give him that. He wanted to transform a dictatorship in the Middle East into a beacon of democracy within a couple of years. Given such a thing has never happened in the history of humanity, such a goal showed great imagination. But he showed little acceptance of the world as it is.

By contrast, Obama has yet to show much imagination but he has seemed to show a real acceptance of the world as it is. He seems very realistic.

And to me, this explains why Obama’s approval ratings have steadily slipped. He hasn’t promised that anything will be easy. He has not claimed that in reality we’re well positioned. There is nothing exciting about confronting a reality that is full of issues as difficult as climate change, two wars (well, occupations really), the worst recession in a century, and health care costs that are steadily eroding salaries and competitiveness.

Yet the potential that comes from honestly addressing reality as it is, well that’s a potential for great achievement.

For me, Obama is addressing the real issues with real solutions. There is nothing easy, exciting, or quick about this. Drucker once said something to the effect of, “even the grandest strategies eventually devolve into real work.” And yet it is work that, finally, works.

I actually feel better about Obama now than I did a year ago. I guess this puts me back into the minority. But you know, after 8 years of watching Bush, I get some comfort from that.

Palin for President?

“You are responsible for the predictable consequences of your actions.”
- Noam Chomsky


72% of Republicans said they would support Sarah Palin for President in 2012. At the risk of pointing out what might seem to be obvious to some, let me just say why it would be a bad idea for Palin to be President.

Leadership suggests a capacity to predict consequences of an action. The complexity of the decisions you make is limited by your ability to predict consequences.

Listen to Sarah talk. Tell me this woman is responsible in this sense. Tell me she can predict consequences of any system that is at all complex when she can't articulate anything that is at all complex. Sarah very quickly gets lost in syntax and grammar. One can only imagine what happens in that head of hers when she is considering something like the economy or foreign policy.

Embodied Cognition and Leadership

For once, we weren't meeting for a meal. Bernard wanted to walk on this gorgeous day and I was more than game. It was chamber of commerce weather and we were walking amidst the crowds at Balboa Park, engaged in a form of peri-philosophy (Bernard's word for walking around discussing ideas) as old as speech, I imagine.

"The latest ideas from cognitive science are subversive," Bernard said.

"Which ideas," I inquired.

"Embodied cognition," he said. "The idea that cognition is inseparable from the body or even the environment. It's a rejection of the claim that the mind sits separate from the body."

"How is this so subversive?"

"Well, it suggests that the mind is emergent from the body, not separate, and this undermines all kinds of authority."

"What?" Leave it to Bernard to leap from cognitive science to social power. "How did you make this leap?"

"Well, think about it. In the model of mind as separate from body, body is obviously subject to mind - or should be in the person with any will power at all. Mind is more pure than body and mind directs body; telling it where to go and what to do. The mind tells the hand to pick up a glass, or the foot to step towards the counter. This is the old model."

"Yeah. How does that contradict what you said before?"

"Well, if the dichotomy of mind and body is false, then it is not true that the mind directs the foot as if it is sending an order from central command to remote troops. It could easily be that the desire to move comes from the foot - as an extremity it might be the first to notice a need for water, say - and the knowledge about HOW to move is embodied in the foot - at least in part - and not just the brain. It's not true that the brain is the authority and the foot is the, er, willing foot soldier."

"Oh." I walked a few steps absorbing this. "That is different. So you are saying that even the notion that the impulses and choices and signals that we normally associate with the mind and think of as residing in the brain are, in fact, distributed more broadly through the body? Even in places like the foot?"

"Yep." Bernard loved it when I eventually understood. "At least that's what I got."

"Okay." I'm slow but persistent. "So, this is subversive how?"

"Well, the traditional model of leadership of organizations is all based on the notion of mind body divide. We call the leader 'the head' of the organization in reference to this. The authority comes from some outside inspiration or revelation that is not embodied in the organization but comes into it through the head, the leader."

"So if the mind is embodied then perhaps leadership is too? Leadership is actually distributed more broadly than we thought?"

Bernard had a little grin. "Yep."

I laughed. "So, you think that you can trigger social change by sharing the lesson of embodied cognition, a relatively obscure branch of cognitive science, itself a fairly obscure area of study?"

He looked hurt and shook his head. "Now why did you have to say that?"

I had no answer to his question. "You know, Bernard, a shift like that has more potential than most notions."

"It does, doesn't it," he grinned again, his new idea still safe. And I knew he was right, really. As our models of the world gradually change, so does our world. By adapting to the reality we perceive, we create it. And besides, I liked this idea: embodied leadership.

President as Community Organizer - A New, 21st Century Model?

Every successful candidate allows allows the polity to project upon him as he (or she) nods and smiles. So, to interpret Obama now is as much a confession of hope as it is analysis. My confession? I rather hope that Obama re-defines the presidency along the lines of community organizer.

I find it curious that so little has been made of Obama’s background as a community organizer. Personally, I think that it offers a delightful model for modern leadership.

A community organizer has no formal power. The older I get, the more I think that formal power is a joke. Employees, citizens, players on a team … they all tend to do what they want. I realize that my own personality is ambivalent about formal authority, but I think more people are like me than not. Leaders have to work with people – not dictate to them. Formal power is gradually going the way of thumb screws.

A community organizer has a goal that transcends the organizations in that community. If you live in a good community, that suggests things about the families that live there, the jobs available, the aesthetic, the health care, the options for entertainment and engagement … it suggests a great deal that transcends any one institution or group. A community shows up in the spaces between traditional organizations – not within them.

A community organizer has to use conversation as a starting point for creating commitments. A community organizer needs to talk about consequences and the impact of one group upon another. A community organizer needs to create visibility – making visible the impact of polluting to industry and the impact of job loss to the environmentalists.

It’ll be interesting to see how Obama draws from his experience as a community organizer. I quite like the idea of his using the position – not as a bully pulpit so much as a local pub where everyone can gather to discuss what kind of a community we want to create.

Obama pioneered the use of the Internet, texting, and email for campaigning in ways that will be talked about for decades. Now he can be to the Internet what FDR was to the radio in his presidency - using new technology to enable virtual communities to emerge and impact real policy and physical communities.

And perhaps what I find most alluring about this model is the notion that a conversation about something bigger than any one industry or school could emerge. We have an array of possibilities that are still largely untapped because we take as a given that, to quote Lilly Tomlin, “We’re all in this alone.” What if someone actually could again make us a community instead of a collection of competing special interest groups and individuals trying to make it alone?

We live in a time of massive interdependency. This suggests the need for more coordination and unifying goals than ever. And yet the real measure of progress is autonomy – allowing each individual more freedom of choice about how to live. The one way I can think of to reconcile these two competing needs is through leadership that looks more like community organizer than elected dictator.

Let’s hope that Obama remembers his roots.

A Convenient Lie About Leadership

“What if leadership is not a phenomenon determined by the ability of an individual? What if the leader does not actually cause outcomes? What if the central role of the leaders is designed to perpetuate a myth of control and to provide false hope for salvation?”
- Rick Barker

McCain has made a name for himself in part by advocating for campaign finance reform, and yet his campaign has been plagued by the scent of little scandals; his campaign manager and chief adviser have taken heat for their prior lobbying work. Conflict is inevitable when people pretend to have control over forces larger than they are.

Obama, although cleaner on the issue of contributions from corporations, is nonetheless in his own kind of denial about market forces and the power of corporations.

McCain and Obama have joined the parade of well intentioned politicians who simply haven’t admitted the central fact of our time: the corporation is today’s dominant institution. The corporation defines the norms and goals of our modern world as surely as the church did medieval times or the state did the 18th and 19th centuries. The state has about as much influence over the corporation as the early guilds had over the medieval church.

McCain, like Obama, has tapped into the fact that most 70% of Americans tend not to trust big companies. (In the EU, about 60% of Americans tend not to trust big companies.) By contrast, only 44% of Americans tend not to trust the UN.

Fortune 50 (not 500) employ nearly 8% of the American workforce even though they make up, by raw number, only 3/10,000th of a percent of the companies in the US.

Americans tend not to trust big companies for a variety of reasons but still find themselves reliant on them for jobs, products, financing, and services.

Big companies define more than the workforce. They define the work norms, the products we use, salaries, the media products we consume, and the focus of anyone intent on success. If they chose to relocate overseas, communities lose jobs and tax revenues; states and countries compete for corporations and are increasingly unlikely to dictate terms to corporations.

The dominance of the corporation is big deal that doesn’t get mentioned. If politicians did mention it, they’d be unable to sustain the myth of control over the events that control people’s lives. People continue to prefer the story that evil doers (be they terrorists or greedy CEOs) are making our lives bad to the more probable story that every period of history is defined by forces and trends larger than any individuals. As any surfer will tell you, sometimes it makes more sense to ride waves than fight them.

Chapter 7 Change in Thinking Video - Leadership

In this final chapter, I simply declare that just as it would be good for a person living in Itay to speak Italian, so it would be good for a person dealing with systems to adopt systems thinking.

Systems thinking will be to the next economy what reductionist, or analytical, thinking was to the industrial revolution. It's time to begin taking a systems perspective.

Liberation Leadership

For me, the measure of progress is autonomy. People with cars are more advanced than people who only have shoes because people with cars have more choices about where to go and when. People who live in a democracy are more advanced than people who live under rule of a despot because they have more choice about how to live their lives.

If autonomy is the measure of progress, it suggests something about leadership. Peter Block once said that he saw leadership as a collusion between control freaks and the irresponsible. In my mind, genuine leadership shows people a way out - it instructs, inspires, and liberates a person to live life more fully. Great leadership should end at some point - leaving the person more free than when first led, more able to define and pursue a life of one's own choosing.

One of the many problems with most models of leadership is that they institutionalize leadership into a position. I think that leadership ought to be better thought of as a project - like parenting. Get the led to a particular point and then allow them their own lives. Employees, citizens, and believers all ought to reach a point of graduation, like students, after which they are expected to operate with what they have learned.

Leadership that does not have the goal of liberation is not leadership - it is control. Leadership creates choices, control constrains them.

Error Alert Levels

It's time for a truly practical warning system for the American people: the error alert level. Instead of the rankings of low, guarded, elevated, high, or severe used by Homeland Security, we could have an error alert system that informs the citizenry of its leader's state of mind, as follows:

Grounded (Green): regularly discarding and modifying theories and hypotheses as new facts arrive.

Idealistic (Blue): reluctant, but ultimately willing, to discard preconceived notions when opposing facts begin to arrive.

Ideologue (Yellow): will accept facts that contradict one's world view as long as acknowledging these inconvenient facts helps one to make policies more effective (even if said policies are mere instruments to impose the very worldview now being contradicted by facts).

High (Orange): unclear from the bloodshot eyes just what this leader believes or where he was the night of the accident. Has completely confused a sense of confidence with proof.

Delusional (Red): We can't know the facts for years, maybe centuries. You'll need to trust my sense of destiny. Historians will hold parades for my descendants.

I've gotten agreement from both parties to begin using this system. Leaders will agree to wear ties that correspond to Homeland Security's color code, alerting the polity as to their personal error alert level. As you can see below, George has already begun to use the color system for his ties.

Bush Re-Defines Vietnam, Failure, and Leadership

This from the BBC:

President Bush is seeking to redeem the Vietnam War.

He has tried to turn conventional wisdom about that war (that it was a quagmire and a sideshow in strategic terms) on its head.

Having finally given up on stopping his critics from drawing parallels between Iraq and Vietnam, Bush has decided to it would be easier to re-define failure than it would be to change the course of events in Iraq. The statistics measuring "progress" in Iraq are damning for all but the delusional.

It is not just that the Iraqi war and occupation is now forecast to cost about $1 trillion. (Enough to give every working person in America a tax refund of $7,500.) 2,000 Iraqis are fleeing the country every day, and for good reason. In July alone, nearly 2,000 Iraqi civilians were killed. Each day, about 60 Iraqis are being killed - up from about 30 a day last year. (And given the difference in population, 60 a day is equivalent to about 1,000 Americans being killed each day!) About a million Iraqis have been killed since the occupation. American forces dropped five times as many bombs in Iraq in the first six months of 2007 than they did in the first six months of 2006.

Folks in Baghdad get only about 1 to 2 hours a day of electricity, in a country where average daytime temperatures are 110 to 120 degrees a day. 17 of Prime Minister Maliki's 37 ministers have walked out. (The equivalent of having every other cabinet member and his department (e.g., defense and education and environmental protection agency) separate from Bush's government.) $11 billion of Iraqi reconstruction funds are missing. About 30% of the equipment given to Iraqi troops by the Pentagon (including 110,000 AK-47 rifles) is also missing. The percentage of babies born underweight since the occupation has spiked to 11% (compared to 3% before the invasion).

If, as Bush claims, all this constitutes a success, then how could Vietnam be anything but a success. How could it not be? The fact that 5.1 million Vietnamese were killed during the war (4 million civilians) would do little to suggest it was ought but success. It cost us about $120 billion (back when a billion was real money) and 58,209 American lives. None of that mattered. What matters to George is that we failed to continue pounding our head against the wall. After dropping more bombs on Vietnam than we dropped on all of Europe during World War 2, we gave up too soon. A stunning conclusion to reach without the assistance of alcohol.

Once Bush has managed to redefine Vietnam and Iraq as successes (and what, one can't help but asking, would these wars have looked like had they been failures?), he plans to redefine space, time, and subprime mortgages. For you see, Bush is also redefining leadership. To put words in his mouth (given that there is no sock handy), "Leadership is shared delusion."

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Sharing the outrage over Bush's defense of Vietnam:
Mediamatters
Jim Hoagland at the San Diego Union-Tribune

Dysfunctional Cultures & The Leader Nerd

Too often, we trust only members of our own culture. This is particularly problematic when we're stuck in a dysfunctional culture in need of change. At such times we might do better to follow someone outside of the culture, even someone who seems like a nerd.

One well-deserved reason that corporations have become the dominant institution is their approach to culture. Within the world of political speeches, culture is revered as something to preserve. Within the world of business speeches, it is more often criticized as something to change.

To me, the most important element of culture is the “cult” portion. Often, a particular culture is defined by a shared notion of the world, shared rituals, shared values. These notions and values don’t need to help the group succeed in the world. In fact, the dismal failure resulting from adherence to such cultures may actually lead to a bonding as the group discusses the ways in which the world is unfair or unreasonable in its demands.

What intrigues me about candidates like Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich and, most notably, Ralph Nader is that they have the potential to be real leaders. They aren’t pandering to the culture, telling people things like “You deserve your big SUV” or “You deserve to be a single parent.” Typically less savvy about the power of popular culture than the demands of reality, such candidates are interesting because they point to the inherent flaws in our culture.

Too often, we confuse leadership with popularity. Leadership suggests two things: you’re taking a group somewhere they’ve not yet been and people are following. Most often, candidates pledge allegiance to our cultish practices, whether it is burning witches or burning carbon-based fuels. Less often do candidates show potential for leadership by actually going somewhere new, by challenging our cultish practices. Too often we don’t really want leaders who stretch us to move to new places. Rather, we’re looking for someone cool to hangout with at the local diner.

Sadly, too few candidates have the courage to speak out against dysfunctional cultures like the inner-city black culture, the culture of consumption as entertainment, or the culture of entitlement. Of course, to do so would be to be critical of, and therefore alienate, the poor, the rich, and the middle-class. I guess in that sense, politics is just like high school: it’s never cool to point out that what the rest of the gang thinks of as cool isn’t actually all that cool. In fact, I think that they call the people who do that nerds, a group groups generally avoid.

But nerds have made marvelous leaders in other domains, like science and technology. Perhaps once politics is taken more seriously, when people begin to realize that the consequences of good or bad policy are actually a matter of life or death, nerds will get the audience they deserve. Until then, we'll be stuck here in the diner, hanging out with the cool kids who pretend to be leaders as we spin on our bar stool, confusing motion with progress.

International "Be Your Own Leader" Day

"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."
- Soren Kierkegaard

I've tended to write a great deal about autonomy. To me, it seems like a compelling motivation and I tend to forget that all of us subordinate it to other goals at times. Sometimes freedom of choice is simply overwhelming and we'd much prefer a prescription. "Take these classes and then pursue this exciting career as an airport kiosk tender. Trust us, it's the best you can do."

It's worth remembering that the peasants in Prussia ran to the defense of royalty - the very peasants whose lives were miserable and poor. A similar thing happened during the French Revolution. To this day, some people prefer strong leaders, even if their conditions under them are miserable.

I once heard management consultant Peter Block state, "Leadership is a collusion between control freaks and the irresponsible." The very notion of strong leadership may rest of the fact of a significant portion of the population having what we might, somewhat delicately, call psychological issues.

Sometime between the age of 15 and 30, we tell our children that there is no such thing as a free lunch - this after they've been eating them all their lives. Development transitions are tricky. I suspect that we're at a point in history where progress will depend on a critical mass of the population rejecting a model of leadership that we've been dependent upon for centuries.

One way to look at the Protestant Reformation is to see it as a rejection of the strong leader in the form of a pope. The idea at the heart of the Protestant Revolution is that the individual would, ultimately, be responsible for his or her own salvation and peace. The neurotic conditions such a burden can trigger would be itself worthy of its own thesis, but it is freedom.

It is easy to see the Enlightenment-era overthrow of monarchs as another chapter in the rejection of strong leaders.

Given that history never looks like history when you're living through it, many have missed the overthrow of the banker as the strong leader who determines whether you deserve credit and how long you have to pay back loans. The credit card is both symbol of, and means for, the individual freedom to decide whether or not to incur debt and how quickly to pay it back. As with freedom of religion and democracy, credit has been a promise and a threat. Those in poverty in the 19th century may have felt like victims of fate, whereas today's bankrupt may well feel like victims of their own choices (or the fine print of clever lawyers).

Freedom from strong leadership brings with it a particular accountability that all of us would like to shirk at times. But I do think that once a person gets past the existential void of "but what do I do if not what has been prescribed for me?" this freedom is empowering.

Rather than ask ourselves "Who will be president in 2008?" we might ask ourselves, "Who will I be in the game of politics in 2008?" We should continually remind ourselves to be our own leaders. Companies are desperate for our business. Politicians are desperate for our votes. If we lead, they will follow. Where else would they go?

Questioning Leadership

“Do we decide questions at all?
We decide answers no doubt, but surely the questions decide us.”
- Lewis Carrol, Alice in Wonderland

“Human systems grow in the direction that they continually ask questions about.”
- Tal D. Ben-Shahar, Harvard Happiness Professor

Traditional teachers and leaders, preparing people for a defined and predictable future, ask questions for which they know the answer and then judge subsequent results.

We live in a time of such complexity that no one knows the answers in advance. Are we ready to follow a new generation of teachers and leaders who don't offer answers but, instead, focus us on questions? Are we ready to give up on this dated notion of turning to leaders for answers?

"The myth of leadership is a collusion between control freaks and people who don't want to take responsibility."
- Peter Block

Leadership and Social Innovation

Leadership suggests two things. One, you are going someplace new. Two, you have followers. By definition, leaders can't look to their followers for a destination and yet that seems to be just what politicians have been doing of late.

W. Edwards Deming said, "No customer ever asked for the telephone or bicycle or computer."

Reliance on focus groups and polling numbers will never substitute for real leadership, for the kind of innovation that offers solutions. Great leaders are invariably adept at one of two things: either they are social innovators or know how to popularize social innovations. FDR's New Deal, Gandhi's non-violent protests, and Teddy Roosevelt's conservation programs were all innovations and represented leadership at its best.

The 2008 presidential race has already begun. I'm looking for a leader who will champion or generate social innovations.

Leadership, Possibility and Us Critics

Life is full of possibilities, most which we don’t even consider.

It's Friday and tonight you could read a book and enjoy it thoroughly. You could read a book but if you do you'll miss out on hitting the clubs with your friends, attending a play, watching a live concert, rock wall climbing, dining at the new tapas restaurant you've been curious about, jogging in preparation for a half-marathon scheduled for this summer, trying out that new curried chicken recipe that looked so good, starting to write your own book, mustering up the courage to contact the Toastmaster's group, begin a weight-lifting program, drive out to Las Vegas for the weekend, wander around the mall with your friend, experiment with meditation, buy a DNA kit and send in a sample for analysis and family history, make sandwiches for 20 homeless people, volunteer at a youth club, visit a .... You get the idea. For every one thing you consciously choose to do you are consciously or unconsciously choosing not to do about a million other things.

Powerful leaders have the ability to tune us in to possibilities that we had not previously, or seriously, considered.

"By the end of this decade, we will put a man on the moon and return him safely," JFK said. We are going to make a personal computer that the average person will want to use. We will make our downtown areas so safe and so stimulating that families will feel delighted to have their children go downtown at any time. We will transform people's idea of fast food into meals that make people feel more vibrant, more alive, to feel healthy.

A leader works like a radio receiver, able to pull signals out of the air, signals that the rest of us perceive only as static, and broadcast that possibility as something compelling, into a tune we can dance to. After a leader speaks, static turns into a tune we hum.

So what is our job here in the blogosphere? It is to point out to the humming masses that there are alternatives to the tune they are humming. Opportunity costs suggests that we don't just judge the book you're reading but actually consider what else you could be doing. A social critic notes that we're about to spend $1.2 trillion on the occupation of Iraq and asks what else one could buy with that sum.

Your mission, should you accept it, is to sing songs of possibility that are so compelling that leaders and the humming masses have little choice but to tune in. It's hard work, but what else were you going to do with your blog?