Failed leadership at Copenhagen 2009

Final text of the Copenhagen Accord 2009

From the guardian.co.uk – December 21, 2009

We’re all eco-warriors now after world leaders failed us at Copenhagen

What did the UN climate change talks in Copenhagen achieve? Our governments failed to agree a deal which might have avoided a global catastrophe. They did nothing but take yet another “important first step”. We’ve had nearly two decades of those.

It’s likely that Copenhagen is a long-term disaster for the planet and its people, but it might have another, more immediate consequence for you right now. Your moral obligations might have just changed dramatically. In situations like the one we’re in now, the demand for action shifts from our leaders to us. They missed what might have been our last chance to take to take concerted, worldwide action on climate change, so the rest of us have to do something about it. Their failure means that we’re all eco-warriors now.

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The Builder’s Manifesto

Umair Haque, over at the Harvard Business Review, has an excellent post titled The Builder’s Manifesto, that speaks directly to the article from The Guardian above. It is certainly worth reading.

It seems that in order to tackle the most complex of social problems that we face in our world today, we don’t need more leaders… we need builders.

Excerpt from The Builder’s Manifesto below (bold emphasis mine):

What leaders “lead” are yesterday’s organizations. But yesterday’s organizations — from carmakers, to investment banks, to the healthcare system, to the energy industry, to the Senate itself — are broken. Today’s biggest human challenge isn’t leading broken organizations slightly better. It’s building better organizations in the first place. It isn’t about leadership: it’s about “buildership”, or what I often refer to as Constructivism.

Leadership is the art of becoming, well, a leader. Constructivism, in contrast, is the art of becoming a builder — of new institutions. Like artistic Constructivism rejected “art for art’s sake,” so economic Constructivism rejects leadership for the organization’s sake — instead of for society’s.

Builders forge better building blocks to construct economies, polities, and societies. They’re the true prime movers, the fundamental causes of prosperity. They build the institutions that create new kinds of leaders — as well as managers, workers, and customers.

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