A Failure of Nerve -- Chapter 6
Take Five
Thinking in the social sciences has rarely made the kind of conceptual leap that is characteristic of other fields of knowledge.
The treadmill upon which many parents and managers find themselves has less to do with problems of methodology and data that with a flaw in the basic model.
Rather than finding new answers to established questions it is the basic questions themselves that must be reframed.
More than a view of reality is at stake here; the emphasis in our civilization on data, on method, on technique, and on social science categories misdirects leaders in two ways:
What our civilization needs most is leaders with a bold sense of adventure.
A leader's major effect on his or her followers has to do with the way his or her presence affects the emotional processes in the relationship system.
The 20th century has been a century of continuous surprise.
All paradigm shifts are innovations, but not every innovation deserves to be called a paradigm shift.
Society is the product, not the sum, of human relationships.
The functioning of individuals in any relationship system is not primarily the result of their won personalities. People tend to express that part of their nature which is regulated by the emotional processes in the present system.
Models differ from traditional social science assumptions in three major ways:
When a self-directed member is being consistently frustrated, what will turn out to be true 100 percent of the time is that the person at the very top of that institution is a peace-monger.
Well-differentiated leader is someone who has clarity about his or her own life's goals and is less likely to become lost in the anxious emotional processes.
Transcending the categories of the social science construction of reality:
Friedman, E. H. A failure of nerve: Leadership in the age of the quick fix.