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Newsweek
08-07-2025
- Politics
- Newsweek
The Story of America's Declaration of Cultural Independence
Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the interpretation of facts and data. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. America's declaration of political independence is a story Americans are familiar with. But few know the story of America's declaration of cultural independence, which took the form of a speech by Ralph Waldo Emerson at Harvard College in 1837. By then, America's political institutions were taking shape, but a lingering question remained for Emerson: Could this new nation formed on the basis of government by the people create a culture and art that reflected our political ideals? In short, could America create our own Cervantes? Or our own Shakespeare? Or our own Michelangelo? The British cultural critic Sidney Smith had his doubts—as did most of the cultural elites of London, Paris and Vienna. "Who reads an American book? Or goes to an American play? Or looks at an American picture or statue?" Smith opined. Smith had a point. The grave of the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (right) in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts. The grave of the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (right) in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts. Photo by Detroit Publishing Company/"There were a few American writers—James Fenimore Cooper and some early frontier writing, along with Edgar Allan Poe and Washington Irving. But America wasn't exactly a beacon of culture or literary talent," Hillsdale College professor and author of Land of Hope Wildred M. McClay said to Our American Stories." The most impactful part of Emerson's speech came near the end. It was his call for America's separation from England's ruling elites—and Europe's, too—on the cultural front. "We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe," Emerson declared. And then came his challenge to American creatives that reverberated throughout the country. "We will walk on our own feet, we will work with our own hands, we will speak our own minds," Emerson insisted. "A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believe himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men." Emerson rightly saw the American revolution as a turning point in world history and had great admiration for the civilian army—filled with volunteer merchants, farmers and tradesmen—that fought and defeated the professional British Army. He longed for that same animating spirit in our cultural class: A bottom-up movement filled with creatives that represented our bottom-up governing ideal. Emerson's speech shook things up, with one small town outside Boston jump-starting America's cultural revolution: Concord. It played an outsized part in our military history and was about to become the center of America's literary and cultural universe, too. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne were all born in or close to Concord. All were buried there, too. What drew these writers together was a spiritual movement that placed the sanctity of nature—and the sense of the divine that nature inspires—at the center of the world: transcendentalism. "It was accompanied by a growing movement across the art world—The Romantic Movement—devoted to the sanctity of the individual," McClay noted. "In a nation whose organizing document began with the words 'We the People,' it made complete sense that the individual should be held in such high esteem by America's artists and writers. And the public, too." Transcendentalism also shared a common denominator with America's evangelical Christianity of the time. "Neither were interested in how things were done in the past: the established social elites of the day were the problem," McClay explained. "Transcendentalism was birthed alongside the rising strain of anti-authoritarianism in a new nation seeking to find its own way. Its own voice." From Emerson's speech would spring the work of Herman Melville, who was born in New York City but was profoundly influenced by what was happening in Concord. Leaves of Grass was published in 1855, and Melville sent a copy to Emerson, who responded with a letter of his own. "I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed," Emerson wrote back to Melville, who'd never attended college. Leaves of Grass was a big publishing sensation, and Whitman became the unofficial poet laureate of America's common man. "There was Whitman himself, in the iconic photo that graced the books cover, dressed in common worker's clothing," McClay explained. "Writing in open, free unrhymed verse, his writing reflected the city and country he loved. And its democratic ideals." No one better understood the significance of Whitman's work than British literary legend D.H. Lawrence—and the artistic talent about to be unleashed by this new Democracy. "Whitman's essential message was the Open Road," Lawrence wrote. "The leaving of the soul free unto herself, the leaving of his fate to her and to the loom of the open road. Which is the bravest doctrine man has ever proposed to himself. The true democracy where soul meets soul, in the open road." McClay concluded: "That's what Concorde produced: A body of American literature—and a soon to be developed body of American culture—that reflected the nation's values and virtues. Created by the people and for the people. America had found her muse. Had found her voice." What did Concord lead to? To distinctive American voices too many to name, like Mark Twain, Flannery O'Conner, Harper Lee, Earnest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Robert Frost, Tennessee Williams and August Wilson. Concord unleashed to the world America's musical contributions, which sprang from our universal appeal as a nation, and our multi-ethnic, multi-racial citizenry, and produced a mash-up of musical styles and influences that could only have been possible in America. From Tin Pan Alley to Broadway musicals, from American blues to country, bluegrass and our own unique varieties of Gospel, too, and our homegrown rock and roll, itself a mashup of America's many unique musical genres. And from Concord we produced our own classical music, too, best epitomized by George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. Concord led to our own brand of movies, forged not by old American wealth but by entrepreneurial immigrants from Eastern Europe, many of them Jews escaping pogroms throughout that part of the world: Louis B. Meyer (MGM), Adolph Zukor (Paramount), The Warner Brothers and more. And directors (movies being a director's medium) who were themselves immigrants or the children of immigrants: Frank Capra, who came to America from Italy with his Catholic parents at the age of 6. Billy Wilder (German and Jewish), John Ford (first-generation Irish Catholic), George Cukor (Hungarian and not religious) and more. Concord led to our own brand of cartoons and animated content: EB White, Walt Disney, Dr. Suess, Mel Blanc and Pixar. And even our own brand of superheroes, which started with comic books that would become the biggest movie franchises in the world. Concord also led to the birth of America's own brand of sports. Baseball, which sprang from our rural roots, was our version of cricket. American football was our own more militaristic and exciting version of European football: soccer. Basketball was created from scratch a mere 60 miles from Concord as an evangelizing tool by a young Christian gym teacher named James Naismith. We even created our own brand of motorsport, which sprang from the American South's moonshining past: NASCAR. Would American art, culture and sport have come into its own without Emerson's speech? More than likely. But his Harvard speech kick-started a revolution in one small city, Concord, that helped launch a revolution in American culture. One that still reverberates today. If reread by artists and creatives across our nation, Emerson's Harvard speech might just kick-start another revolution today, and a new declaration of independence from the two cities—New York and Los Angeles—that have for far too long dominated the creation, curation and distribution of content in our vast nation. Those two cities—as big as they are—don't represent the breadth, depth and soul of America's people any more than the cities of London and Paris and Vienna did when Emerson wrote his clarion call to American creatives back in 1837. Or the aspirations and ideals of the people of our vast nation.
New York Times
03-07-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
This Is the Birthright Reckoning That America Needs
What makes someone an American? A question that can sometimes be read as gauzily abstract has been, in the first months of the nation's 47th presidency, urgently literal. It's also complicated, not least by something I find beautiful about America. It is a nation that has always seemed to be in a liminal state: an experiment in progress, an incomplete draft, 'a country,' as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, 'of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations.' Its borders, its compact, even its flag were in a constant mode of revision, and as such, its people are too: a nation of the self-made and the reinventing. A person can 'become' an American in a sense that feels more like adoption or religious conversion than it does a change in legal status. In its myth, America is a promise and an invitation that can be laid claim to by birth, but also by creed. But there is a cruel irony underlying this beauty. That feeling of openness and possibility is not just a product of the noble designs of the founders. It is the product of the country's bloodiest and most rapacious impulses. Even before its independence, the fledgling nation wanted a constant flow of reinforcements to secure and defend the frontier, both from the competing powers of the Old World and from the Indigenous peoples of the New. Manifest Destiny urged the country to push ever westward, requiring the forcible dispossession and removal of the American Indians who lived in those lands. It also needed settlers to occupy and hold them. And so, as the legal scholar Aziz Rana argues, the nation instituted policies of open entry and easy naturalization, widespread noncitizen voting and free land for settlers, motivated less by a spirit of welcome than by an imperative of geographic and economic expansion. These policies drove the first great wave of immigration to America, during the frontier era, beckoning first Anglo Protestants, then Northern and Western Europeans more generally. Eventually, especially after the closing of the frontier in 1890, the country needed workers for its industrializing cities and extended its welcome to Southern Europeans, who arrived in a second titanic surge. If America is a nation of immigrants, it is because it was first a nation of conquest and violent displacement. Every country has its myths, its memory and a set of ideals that shape its terms of belonging. But these abstractions have particular salience in the Americas where, as the political scientist Benedict Anderson observed, national identity was a more deliberate act of invention: Unlike Europe, where nations imagined themselves as ancient, awakening to an identity traced to an ancestral past, those in the New World thought of themselves as being newly born. This is perhaps nowhere more true than in the United States. These ideas may feel far removed from the practical concerns of politics. After all, it's not clear what bearing they have on what the tax rate should be or how to fund Medicaid. But national identity matters because it is a precondition for us to make decisions together, especially the hard ones that may require sacrifice. Our self-conception has always been a contested one, the product of conflict rather than consensus. And in the present moment, it feels like Americans are deciding, once again, what kind of nation we will be. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
NDTV
03-07-2025
- General
- NDTV
US Independence Day 2025: Wishes, Quotes And Messages To Celebrate Fourth Of July
The US celebrates Independence Day on July 4 every year to commemorate the country's declaration of Independence from Great Britain in 1776. This year, the fourth of July will mark the 249th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America. This day has a rich history and significance, and is a day of pride for the US. It is a federal holiday, which means most services across the country remain shut for the day. Americans observe this holiday with fireworks displays, patriotic parades, family gatherings, barbecues and singing national songs. As the Fourth of July is just around the corner, here are wishes, messages and quotes you can send to your loved ones to brighten their day. Fourth of July wishes and messages: Happy 4th of July! May you feel triumphant on this wonderful day of freedom! May the spirit of freedom and unity continue to inspire every American to strive for a brighter future together. May this Independence Day remind us of the sacrifices made by our forefathers and inspire us to uphold the principles of liberty and justice for all. A day of gratitude and liberty! Wishing you a warm and happy Fourth Of July. Happy Independence Day. Also Read | Why Do Americans Celebrate July 4? Know Its History And Significance Let us honour the diversity that strengthens our nation and work towards a future where every American can pursue their dreams without barriers. Here's to a celebration filled with joy, pride, and gratitude for the blessings of living in a land of opportunity and freedom. Wishing for peace, prosperity and equality for all citizens as we celebrate the values that make America great. May this Fourth of July bring freedom from sorrows and pave the way for positivity. Let us unite to celebrate the day as true Americans. Happy Independence Day! Fourth of July Quotes "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country." - John F Kennedy "America means opportunity, freedom, power." - Ralph Waldo Emerson "As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality." - George Washington "Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it." - Thomas Paine "We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honours if we had stopped with the Declaration of Independence." - Mark Twain "My God! How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!" - Thomas Jefferson "The Fourth of July is a great day for our country-so let's make it a great day for our neighbours, too." - Barack Obama "Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth." - Abraham Lincoln
Fast Company
20-06-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
The case against ‘conscious leadership'
'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.' – Ralph Waldo Emerson There's a new orthodoxy quietly sweeping through executive leadership circles. It goes by many names—embodied awareness, whole-self management, conscious leadership—but the core message is the same: intuition and spiritual presence are the foundations of strategic leadership. At first glance, this seems like progress. Who wouldn't prefer a leader who's self-aware and emotionally attuned. In a business world riddled with brittle egos and performative hustle, a little more reflection is a breath of fresh air. But beneath its soothing language, the practice of Conscious Leadership has more insidious effects on business culture. Pioneered by groups like The Conscious Leadership Group, it has evolved into a sprawling, self-affirming ideology—one that displaces competence with charisma, rigor with resonance, and accountability with affirmation. The result? A growing class of business leaders who mistake internal coherence for external effectiveness—who believe that if they feel right, they must be right. It's not just anti-rational; it's anti-leadership. From Competence to Vibes At the heart of the formal Conscious Leadership framework is the '15 Commitments'—a framework designed to promote self-awareness, integrity, and responsibility. The commitments are trite and self-evident to anyone with a modicum of social or emotional intelligence. But it's not the principles that are the problem, it's their embodiment – conscious leadership heuristics have become popular shorthand in corporate and entrepreneurial leadership circles where Conscious Leadership has taken on its own ideological life. Take the idea of the 'whole-body yes.' It sounds poetic, even profound. But in functional terms, it's an epistemic disaster. The whole-body yes tells you that if something doesn't feel right—in your gut—it's probably wrong. Not just wrong for you, but wrong period. And therefore, you shouldn't do it. Or worse, you shouldn't have to do it. On its face, this confuses intuition with truth. But more dangerously, it provides a prospective license to avoid the hard work of intellectual and moral analysis. Every hesitance becomes an omen to be heeded. Every discomfort becomes a signal to say 'no.' Every debate becomes an attack on your 'authentic self.' In other words: if you don't want to do something, your subconscious probably knows it's ethically compromised or strategically unsound. Therefore, resistance becomes virtue. An undergraduate ethics major could tell you why this notion is so intoxicatingly fallacious: it is the embodiment of confirmation bias. It tells us that whatever feels right is, in fact, right. It's confusing righteousness with rightness, and it's a cloaking device for all of our basest instincts. Sociopaths exhibit this same kind of circular self-assurance. Like Luigi Mangione and the Unabomber, they are able to dress-up their prejudices in a pseudo-ethical manifesto to rationalize the overt violation of ethical norms. Modern neuropsychology has taught us that our brain is quite good at confabulating—retroactively fabricating a reason for unreasonable behavior. That's the essence of the whole-body yes; license for confabulation. Business Leadership Without Skin in the Game You can tell a lot about a framework by who evangelizes it. Conscious leadership tends to take root squarely among venture capitalists, consultants, HR departments, and coaching circles—those stakeholders that are structurally insulated from the consequences of strategic execution. These are not, generally speaking, people with direct exposure to existential business risks. They don't carry payroll. They don't answer to shareholders. They don't navigate hostile markets. They're not in the line of fire. And because of that, they can afford to substitute internal validation for external results. They can afford to confuse feeling good with doing good. In that vacuum of real-world feedback, Conscious Leadership thrives. It spreads through offsites and retreats. It drips into executive workshops and middle-management Slack channels. It cloaks itself in the language of growth while quietly eroding the foundation of competency-based leadership. The Reactionary Core: Anti-Rationality in a Pseudo-Spiritual Shell Despite proselytization among progressive business leaders, Conscious Leadership is a deeply reactionary movement. It doesn't evolve leadership—it regresses to a kind of anti-rational romanticism. It seeks not to integrate intuition with reason, but to replace rational deliberation entirely with internal 'knowing.' In ancient traditions—from Buddhist mindfulness to Greek Stoicism—true wisdom arises from tension: between emotion and restraint, instinct and inquiry, desire and discipline. The project of modernity was about striking this balance. In philosophy, the Enlightenment forced the end of insular thinking and the birth of objective bases for decision-making. In healthcare, we have evidence-based medicine rather than bedside impressions. In law, we have procedural justice instead of the will of the monarch. In finance, we have quantitative models instead of gut instinct. Intuitions may point to the source of what's most fundamentally valuable in human life. But one also needs to recognize that we only get to play the game of modern society if we are able to temper our emotional, gut instincts. Conscious Leadership indulgently short-circuits that developmental arc. You no longer need to sit in discomfort, wrestle with ambiguity, or act in spite of your fear. You simply check in with your 'truth,' and act accordingly. This kind of psychospiritual narcissism used to be the birth right of false gurus and religious fundamentalists, but executives are now importing it into the boardroom. 'Conscious Leadership Isn't for Everyone': The Narcissism of Framing Dissent as Deficiency Perhaps the most telling artifact of this movement's epistemic regression is represented in an article from the formal Conscious Leadership group entitled ' Conscious Leadership Isn't for Everyone.' I felt a wave of relief when I stumbled upon this piece—finally, some humility to balance their ideological self-assurance. Surely, I thought, they'll acknowledge the limits of their framework. Something like: 'Maybe Conscious Leadership doesn't apply so well in a military context, where you can't pause to check in with your body before rushing to save a wounded soldier.' Or: 'Maybe your 'whole-body yes' should be informed by real analysis and empirical evidence.' But no. Instead of setting boundaries (the sign of a real discipline), the article castigates the un-initiated for their small-mindedness. For those not quite ready to 'do the work.' Here's the tone: If you don't resonate with the Conscious Leadership framework, it's not because the framework might be flawed. It's because you aren't ready. You haven't evolved enough. You're still trapped in your fear, your ego, your unconscious patterns. This is the hallmark of every narrow-minded epistemology, from religious cults to multilevel marketing: disagreement is pathologized. Non-belief is recast as immaturity. Critique is rebranded as resistance. What could have been a useful framework becomes a totalizing worldview and a litmus test for identity. It's a circular self-help theology wrapped in the garb of a professional services business model. Perhaps the most dangerous part of Conscious Leadership isn't its spread in coaching circles—but its growing adoption in boardrooms. As performance management becomes politicized and teams crave psychological safety, frameworks like these offer a tempting escape hatch: a way to appear ethical and evolved without committing to the hard metrics of performance or the messy realities of leadership. This trend is more than aesthetic. It's structural. We are watching as companies quietly substitute felt authenticity for functional accountability. Leaders are now praised for their vulnerability, but rarely challenged on the outcomes of their teams. Difficult conversations are avoided in the name of 'staying above the line.' Strategy becomes an exercise in inner alignment. Disagreement becomes a trauma response. But in this context, consciousness is the unique privilege of people who have, in some sense, already 'made it'. Being at the top, they have the material wealth and security to dedicate themselves to introspection and exploration. They exhort this new way of thinking, and discourage the exact model – ambition, competency-building, and hard-work – that allowed them to rise to such a position in the first place. In this way, Conscious Leadership is more rehabilitative than it is strategic; it is a framework that allows the executive caste to recapture some sense of humanity after years of grinding away in corporate gears. For the underlings, aware of the path it took leaders to become leaders, these platitudes ring false. Those being consciously 'led' are happy to pay lip-service to their leader's fluffy worldview as long as it protects their position in the organization. All the while, they feel the necessity to continue delivering tangible results – The only realistic, quantifiable source of security within the organization. The disconnect—between leadership speech and the results-oriented nature of business—simply breeds cognitive dissonance among employees. They need to confabulate a consciousness-based story to explain their strategic decisions, or worse, they actually use the Conscious Leadership Commitments to make those decisions. What Leadership Actually Requires Real leadership doesn't require denial of intuition, but it does require tempering it. It requires navigating the productive tension between feeling and thinking. It means honoring discomfort, not avoiding it. It means acting ethically even when your nervous system is screaming ' run'. And above all, it means holding power not as self-expression—but as responsibility. Leadership isn't about being your most authentic self in the boardroom. It's about making decisions under uncertainty, absorbing pressure so others can thrive, and balancing the needs of the self with the needs of the system. That kind of leadership may not feel as righteous. But it works, particularly in a business context where employees actually care about whether their organization succeeds. Here's another unsexy fact of life and business—the best way to grow spiritually is to find a base of stability. And in many cases, this means having enough material wealth to pay medical bills, repair your car, and care for your family members—and that means that the business must thrive in real financial terms. That's why Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is still a useful framework: we need material security and basic social cohesion before we can work towards self-transcendence. But so-called 'conscious leaders' don't realize that transcendence is path-dependent; they haven't reflected enough to see that rightful leadership is earned through competency, merit, and sacrifice, rather than verbal appeals to higher ideals. Most employees are happy to find enlightenment on their own time and in their own way. They don't want group therapy funded through the HR budget and proselytized by their boss. They'd prefer their leader to lead the way by making sound strategic decisions, and if that is at odds with being an empathetic and ethical human, then yes, you're in a crappy business situation. This isn't a revelation worthy of a book. Conscious Leadership isn't wrong. It's just incomplete. And after all that critique, frankly, the 15 formal Conscious Leadership Commitments are pretty much right. They are general enough to be unchallengeable, but they are represented (and treated) as a comprehensive leadership model. Principles, rules, and commitments are a protection against chaos. They give us something to latch onto in complex situations, like executive leadership. But the truth is, a leader who truly embodies morality, humanism, and empathy has no need for a formal principle. The people who are most ensnared by moral principles and ideologies are those people who most need them—the type of people for whom integrity is unnatural and hard-won. After all, the deeper essence of the 15 Commitments—individual responsibility, curiosity, integrity—ought to be ingrained early in life. These qualities should be nurtured through sound parenting, quality education, and lived experience. When foundational virtues like individual responsibility and empathy haven't been deeply internalized, frameworks like these can feel revelatory—not because they unlock new wisdom, but because they compensate for what should have already been there. Those who most loudly profess their principles often do so to paper over their fragility. Moral status, when secure, doesn't need to be declared—it's lived. So, live consciously and lead consciously, but if you ever hear someone start a sentence with 'in the spirit of conscious leadership', then I suggest you turn tail and run.
Globe and Mail
16-06-2025
- General
- Globe and Mail
Leading change requires a paradoxical mindset rather than either-or thinking
Interested in more careers-related content? Check out our new weekly Work Life newsletter. Sent every Monday afternoon. In his 1841 essay Compensation, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that 'an inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that each thing is a half.' Blogger Billy Oppenheimer recently surfaced that quote and elaborated: 'Dark can't exist without light. Left can't exist without right. Hot and cold. Pleasure and pain. Up and down. Man and woman. Odd and even. In and out. In motion, at rest. Sickness, health. Peacetime, wartime. Strength, weakness. Order, chaos. More, less. Yes, no.' They must be understood as connected and tackled together. 'What is lost in one realm is always compensated for in another,' says Mr. Oppenheimer. 'To gain something is to have given up something.' Transformation and change are supposed to provide clarity for organizations – a mission, a path forward. But they too can be riddled by contradictions which if unaddressed might add to the reasons so many change efforts go awry. Going overboard on one element and ignoring the other element in a quest for dramatic clarity can sink your efforts. In The Art of Change, Jeff DeGraff, a professor of management at the University of Michigan, and his wife, Staney DeGraff, a consultant, say the complexities of change demand a nuanced approach. Adaptability is key and that requires a paradoxical mindset rather than either-or thinking. You must be flexible and agile. You must understand and grapple with competing elements. They identify seven paradoxes that crop up repeatedly and pose dangers if ignored: Instead of rushing to solve urgent issues, they urge you to spot paradoxes you are facing and reflect on them. Look for experiments, small changes that you can learn from. 'By considering creative and hybrid solutions and implementing them with intentionality, you can effectively navigate paradoxes and drive meaningful change,' they advise. One of the paradoxes they highlight is about transcending limits while still being within them. They note that to transcend our limits, we always have to start by acknowledging them – the limits of our knowledge, resources and time. Once we acknowledge those limits, we can facilitate lots of experiences and experiments to learn from them. Perhaps there is another contradiction to consider there: In change, we usually think carefully beforehand, develop ideas that are really theories but become prescriptions, while in fact the learning and understanding (and best prescriptions) come after experimenting with change possibilities. Jason Fried, chief executive officer of Basecamp, raises another duality when he observes that one of the reasons companies have a hard time moving forward is because they've tangled themselves in the near past. They trap themselves looking for certainty where there isn't any, actional advice where there are only guesses. 'Eyes aimed backwards rather than ahead, staring at the dark, feet in their own concrete,' he writes on his blog. He stresses that isn't always wrong. If the process is highly mechanized or isolated, you can look back and find the exact moment when something went wrong. But he argues that most failed projects subject to retrospectives are searches for reasons where there are only humans to be found. We are plaintively searching for reasons where – here's another duality – there are only mysteries. 'A better path is to reflect forward, not backwards. Develop a loose theory while working on what's next. Appreciate there's no certainty to be found and put all your energy into doing better on an upcoming project,' he says. 'But how will you do better next time if you don't know what went wrong last time? Nothing is guaranteed other than experience. You'll simply have more time under the curve and more moments under tension to perform better moving forward.' Tina Dacin, a professor of organizational behaviour at Queen's University, raised another paradox when she looked at Lady Gaga's recent Coachella performance where the singer paid homage to past greats such as Michael Jackson and Prince as well as her different past selves. Prof. Dacin's research with colleagues has found leaders involved in stewarding change and transition in organizations are 'custodians' – people with a vested interest in protecting traditions, while also reimagining and renewing them over time. 'Such custodians in workplaces or social organizations facing disruption take valued remnants from the past and curate them to be accessible and relevant for the future,' she writes in The Conversation. But not just custodians of the past. In making change, she says, you must be custodians of hope. You must craft futures worth preserving. There's a bundle of dualities in there to consider as you reflect on the paradoxes of change. Cannonballs Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn't Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.
