Hello friends… before we dig into today’s meaty T4D let’s talk about “Making it Great”.  A whole bunch more of you ordered your own discounted copy this week.  And you most likely won’t recieve them until the middle of next week.  So let’s plan on digging into them and begin discussing our discoveries on the week of Mar 9th.  I’m hopeful to have a few action items completed by then myself and will appreciate some of your thoughts as well.  Remember we are looking at this book as a primer to get us going, growing and goaling.  It requires that we do more than just read and consider….it requires that we act, think, and DO.  Those with books already — go ahead and get growing.  But those waiting… don’t worry you won’t be left behind. (To read the last few T4D’s about this book click here or just visit www.kirkweisler.com/t4d and scroll down.)

OK…. last week I posted an excerpt from the foreward of the 25th anniversary edition of Servant Leadership that many of you really seemed to enjoy.  I know I did!  To read it click here or paste away. http://kirkweisler.com/t4d/2009/02/11/servant-leadership-things-that-will-destroy-us/

I mentioned that I loved the entire forward by Stephen Covey and that I hoped to convince my 14 year old daughter Brittany to type the whole thing in.  She did, for a price, and you can access it by clicking here.  It’s a bit long, but loaded with content.

Here is another wonderful excerpt from it…

Victor Hugo once said, “There’s nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come.”  Servant Leadership’s time has come.

            The deepest part of human nature is that which urges people- each one of us- to rise above our present circumstances and to transcend our common nature. If you can appeal to it, you tap into a whole new source of human motivation. Perhaps this is why I have found Robert Greenleaf’s teaching on servant leadership to be so enormously inspiring, so uplifting, so ennobling. 

            There is a great movement taking place through out the world today. Its roots, I believe, are to be found in two powerful forces. One is the dramatic globalization of markets and technology. And in a very pragmatic way, this tidal wave of change is fueling the impact of the second force: the force of timeless universal principles that have, and always will govern all enduring success, especially those principles that give “air” and “life” and creative power to the human spirit that produces value in market, organizations, families, and most significantly, individual’s lives. 

Servant Leadership Will Continue to Increase in Relevance

            One of these fundamental, timeless principles is the idea of servant leadership, and I am convinced that it will continue to dramatically increase in its relevance. There is a growing awareness and consciousness around it in the world. One of the things that is driving it, as I have mentioned, is the global economy, which absolutely insists on quality at low costs.  We’ve got to produce more for less, and with greater speed than we’ve ever done before. The only way to do that in a sustained way is through the 3empowerment of people.  And the only way you get empowerment is through high-trust cultures and an empowerment philosophy that turns bosses into servants and coaches, and structures and systems into nurturing institutionalized servant processes.

            A low-trust culture that is characterized by high-control management, political posturing, protectionism, cynicism, and internal competition and adversarial simply cannot compete with the speed, quality, and innovation of those organizations around the world that do empower people. It may be possible to buy someone’s hand and back, but not their heart, mind, and spirit.  And in the competitive reality of today’s global marketplace, it will be only those organizations whose people not only willingly volunteer their tremendous creative talent, commitment, and loyalty, but whose organizations align their structures, systems, and management style to support the empowerment of their people that will survive and thrive as market leaders.

            Leaders are learning that this kind of empowerment, which is what servant leadership represents, is one of the key principles that, based on practice, not talk, will be the deciding point between an organizations’s enduring success or its eventual demise.

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