In today’s modern world we hate to think of violence, and we try to rid the world of it in all its shapes and manifestations. But violence is a force of nature that appears once and again, so, is it really something we should ban from our lives?
The volcano that has completely stopped European air traffic is just a very small reminder of how powerful and violent nature can be. The quiet, slow moving cloud of grey and black ashes whispers in our ears the strories of so many volcanic eruptions in the past, and how they created death and destruction around them. But we must remember, they also generate new life.
Here’s my point for today. Leadership requires certain doses of violence from time to time, and we can’t really shy away from it, unless we want to fool ourselves. And any video of natural life will show that other animals engage in violence quite freely in order to fight for food, for access to the best females and for the respect of others.
We may think we’re different ’cause we’re smarter and all that. But our thinking abilities fool us more often than not, making us think we rule the world until one crummy little volcano stops our lives and our businesses. The fact is we come from the same place that all other animals come from and we also compete for what we truly want. Whether it be intellectual violence, psychological violence or large scale strategic war violence. We keep doing it over and over because through all these combats is how we discover who has the right to survive and the right to lead the rest of us.
If you are smirking and wrinkling you nose at this post, then maybe you should quit crying about wanting to become a leader and start following the people who are willing to pay many kinds of prices, including getting really angry if necessary, in order to earn their colleagues’ trust.
Don’t simplify your way out of this thought provocation either. I’m not saying you have to kill someone to lead. I’m saying you have to know when to show your rage, your anger and your capacity for the necessary violence if you want to be respected by the violent ones.
As a society, we really need to stop judging other people’s violence and putting ourselves above them, in our ‘civilized’ and very evolved manner. It’s a huge lesson in life to come into contact with one’s own rage and to show it to others. Only by dancing with your demons can you really aspire to know them or conquer them.
The diplomatic and “non violance” business way of conduting within the comnaies hazard and confuse people in organizations. The difficulty arise when and how to measure that mentioned violence, understood as courage, rage, etc. A leader must lead this violence to the necessary extent
yes, true. there is nothing easy about managing negative emotiones, especially because they scare us in their possible intensity (or what we think might never end). But if nobody manages them, they run lose and wreak havoc.