Leadership, Change, and Life-Long Learning

Life is unpredictable and change is an iron law of life. Leadership is one of the processes human groups generate in response to change and one of the processes that creates change. But how can leadership be effective if people naturally tend to resist change and if things are changing so rapidly and so profoundly that it’s hard enough just trying to figure out what’s going on?

The frantic pace of change in our technologized, computerized world is one of the most difficult problems facing leaders in all sorts of groups and organizations. How can leaders help their groups solve problems if those problems keep changing from day to day?

Nine or ten generations ago, tradition was as strong a force as change, and people mostly grew up to be whatever their parents had been. Nowadays no generation faces the same problems or circumstances as their parents, and a generation gap seems built in to contemporary history even when the generations get along fairly well.

At the same time, all our social organizations were built to solve yesterday’s problems, not necessarily today’s or tomorrow’s. In our educational institutions, which are supposed to prepare leaders for the future, all we can really hope to teach most of the time are the lessons of the past. Nevertheless, education is still the key to leadership for the future.

Not necessarily just the kind of formal education that takes place in schools during youth, but the kind of education that continues throughout the life cycle. That kind of education is based on curiosity and recognition of problems needing innovative solutions. It’s also based on flexibility of character and a willingness to break old habits and look for new answers to new dilemmas.

When it comes to effective leadership, old dogs have got to keep learning new tricks, or their followers won’t keep following.

The Power of Persistence

Some people are never satisfied unless they’re starting something new. Some people refuse to give up no matter how many times they seem to be down for the count. Some people just don’t take no for an answer. Such a man was Captain David P. Mapes, principal founder of the city in which I live – Ripon, Wisconsin.

After founding the city of Carbondale in Pennsylvania, David Mapes moved on to New York City, where he operated a commercial steamboat and took to calling himself Captain. Before long, his steamboat and worldly fortune sank in New York’s East River.

Undaunted, Mapes packed up and headed west. He didn’t stop until he reached the Valley of Ceresco, ninety miles north of Milwaukee, where a band of utopian socialists led by a visionary named Warren Chase had founded a community the called the Wisconsin Phalanx. Mapes struck a deal with the largest landowner in the area, former Acting Governor of the Michigan Territory John Scott Horner, to sell plots of land to settlers in a brand-new city. They named their city Ripon, after the English cathedral town which was Horner’s ancestral home. Mapes’s primary method of attracting settlers was to flag down passing wagons heading westward and talk up the virtues and advantages of living in Ripon. He was a crackerjack promoter who seldom took no for an answer.

For about two years, a rivalry flourished between Chase, the founder of the Ceresco Commune, and Mapes, the founder of Ripon over the future of their adjacent communities. As the commune faltered around 1850, however, the pioneer spirit of competition gave way to the pioneer spirit of cooperation, and Ceresco was eventually absorbed by Ripon. Mapes soon laid plans to attract responsible settlers by building a college on Ripon’s highest hill. Originally named Brockway College after a man who donated the largest founding gift ($250), the school eventually took its name from the city it lived in – Ripon College. Thus within four years of losing everything he owned, Captain David Mapes had founded a city and a college that have lasted for more than 160 years.