Introduction

Abstract

The term leader has evolved and transmuted over time, often idealizing, even romanticizing, military aspects of leadership to fire up the troops to want to follow their bellicose leader. But leadership is far more than glorifying the hell of war, as we have seen throughout history and very recently again.

Life moves so much more rapidly now than it did before … the huge acceleration in the rate of growth of facts, of knowledge, of techniques, of inventions, of advances in technology …

To put it bluntly, we need a different type of human being … able to live in a world that changes perpetually, which doesn’t stand still, who don’t need to staticize the world … to freeze it and make it stable, who don’t need to do what their daddies did, who are able to face tomorrow not knowing what’s going to come, not knowing what will happen, with confidence enough in ourselves that we will be able to improvise in that situation which has never existed before.

The society which can turn out such people will survive; the societies that cannot turn out such people, will die.

Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature