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HE WHO IS SILENT IS FORGOTTEN

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Sir,

Leadership is one thing that the whole world would pay its most precious price for. If there is anytime the world has needed it so much, it is now. The family is desperate for the mother who will teach her children the principles of success; the father who will raise his children under the banner of truth and virtue. Every institution and every nation must have a leader for guidance. For a ship is safe on the harbour, but that’s not what ships are made for. On this subject, Chris Haggerty, a leading management consultant said, “The goal of most leaders is to get the person to think highly of them as a leader, but the goal of the exceptional leader is to get the person to think highly of themselves.”

An effective leader gets a lot done day by day, week by week, and month after month because he doesn’t mind who gets the credit. He accepts intelligent suggestions of the people he works with or leads as long as it will benefit the organisation or institution and he goes on to give credit where it is due. A good leader must also know how to be a good follower. For this leader doesn’t mind who is right but he is concerned about what’s right.  He is fully aware that everyone’s idea is from one infinite source of supply (God) and therefore genuinely recognises and reverence the ingenuity of others. Andrew Carnegie, a steel mogul, observed: “No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or to get all the credit for doing it.”

Difference

I’m sure you see that often times the difference in institutions and organisations is leadership. Bob Proctor posits: “The effective leader must be a strong originator. That person must be able to originate a constructive idea and to concentrate on that idea ... to reject any other idea that is presented to them which would not aid in the manifestation of the original idea.”
Once he sets out to do one thing, he does not stop until he sees it through. He doesn’t start one thing and leaves it halfway, and begin on another and also drop it unaccomplished. He is a beginner and a finisher.

Being a man of grit, a good leader has a high revolved will. No wonder Emerson said, “The education of the will is the object of our existence.” This leader, as Andrew Carnegie would have it, puts all his eggs in one basket, then watches the basket. He is a kind of a sponge for information which aids him along the road of his life. His life is “a reservoir of power on which he can constantly draw, which will never fail him in any emergency.” He is sure that he has stored away, in his power-house, the energy, the knowledge that will be equal to the great occasion when it comes.

In sum, and as Orison Sweet Marden has it, “He who is silent is forgotten; he who does not advance falls back; he who stops is overwhelmed, distanced, crushed; he who ceases to become greater, becomes smaller; he who leaves off gives up; the stationery is the beginning of the end – it precedes death; to live is to achieve, to will without ceasing.” And that’s leadership in the new economy.

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