A Welcome Addition to Conversation About Leadership
Hawaii is engaged in choosing its next leaders — everything from governor to city and county council members.
As a group, we’re actually hiring the people we want to run our common enterprise, our community.
But as Peter Adler, president and CEO of the Keystone Institute and a longtime Hawaii resident, points out — the state has a problem when it comes to leadership.
We’re proud to be able to bring you his essay and to make it possible for you to engage in a dialogue with him about leadership.
Let me share just the first two paragraphs of his essay:
“The aim of this paper is to confront some of our current leadership dilemmas and explore a pathway that could strategically make headway on important substantive agendas and simultaneously help nurture a successor generation of leaders accustomed to a more encouraging style of leadership.1 If the paper was wildly successful, it would inspire action.
“Hawaii has many stubborn problems. One of them exacerbates the others: our leaders, and those of us who should be insisting on good leadership, are losing the once innate ability to work together. In the rush to arrive at where we are, in the wake of the ambitious and dynamic changes achieved by Hawaii’s post WWII generation, and in the escalating national context of hyperbolic and hyper-polarized politics, the older habits used by Island communities everywhere to discuss, debate, deliberate, and solve challenging problems are severely eroded. Hawaii is one of those island deserts.”
I hope you’ll spend time with Peter’s thoughtful paper and help elevate our leadership discussion.
