Replying to LO25648 --
>I think Winfried wanted us to focus in this topic the LO-dialogue on "Who
>should control the entropy production". But I also think it will be better
>if he speaks for himself.
Dear At and Doc,
thank you very much for your comments, which I value as totally undeserved
gifts - compared to the raw, quickly sketched attempt not to lose and to
contemplate more about
>>...for me leadership is knowing, among other things, where the centre of
>>control should be -- within the system or outside it. For me it should
>>be within the system.
>>This internal leadership requires that other systems outside the system
>>should act with stewardship. In other words, leadership and stewardship
>>form a complementary dual.
So, At, your "Winfried wanted us to focus on" implies more conscious
mail-design than I actually did. In the last few weeks I was so involved
in some projects in our company, that I hardly could follow the
LO-dialogue and even less contribute in the way I was used to. But in
these same weeks I found the list especially rich, colorful and inspiring.
There were so many mails and paragraphs I thought wow, I need to think
about and keep the dialogue alive on them that I have become frustrated
due to the time constraints I encounter. The question, which heads this
thread is growing within me, where 'system - surrounding' pairs are
manyfold: I , LO-list, company, family, my son are the main elements and
any combination of them, as long as it includes me, is in a then special
sense a system with the other elements as the surrounding to this system.
(This is an observation, which I wanted to share in the thread 'What is
structure'...). I hope this could illustrate that the term 'control' in
combination with 'within the system or outside it' catched my special
attention.
Furthermore I am struggling intensely with the relationship between power
and service. First, as manager of strategic planing, I certainly have a
lot of also formal power. On the other hand, as a consultant to the
managers of our product groups, I have to perform my power in a serving
manner, in fact, the better I am able to serve - i.e. let them find out
self, what otherwise I had to force on them -, the greater my power
becomes, requiring even more careful and responsible serving. So I am
thinking in terms of the complementary dual of power and service - this is
definitely not restricted to my role in company. I am not sure, Doc, how
this fits to your 'shared power' as opposed to 'one sided power' -
service, I think, is an application of power, not the sharing of power.
Well, in this context the complementary dual of leadership and stewardship
catched my special attention as well. I must admit, that I thought of
stewardship as a form of service not really knowing what it means. My
dictionary only knows the word steward, and my associations were that of a
waiter or servant. Puzzled by your, Doc, explanation, I checked in a
bigger dictionary of our secretary and there I found 'stewardship'
translated as 'Verwaltung'. Checking back I found 'Verwaltung' translated
as 'administration, management' (as expected), but no 'stewardship'.
When I found all this in one paragraph, I simply couldn't hold it back for
later (which means never for me at the moment). I chose one example from
my internal consulting and in the P.S a private one and packed them in a
few sentences which I hoped to be close enough to english.
>I do not think the misunderstanding it was intended by Winfried in his
>response, but I got the impression that somehow the point which I tried to
>make in my original comment, got deformed.
Your point, At, has fallen on the ground of my context (and its degree of
formal maturity) and may have reacted in a way that it became something
else. Now I have shared some context and should I really have deformed -
in the sense of impaired essentiality - your point, I am eager to learn
how I did so, because then it is likely that I do so also in less safe
environment than this list.
Liebe Gruesse,
Winfried
--KiWiDressler@t-online.de (KiWiDressler)
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