Leaders Thrive By Leading The Change.
Heraclitus is quoted as saying that the only thing that is constant is change[1]. John F Kennedy is also quoted as saying, “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future”[2]. While it is hard to keep up with every change, it is important to be sensitive to changes that affect you as a person or aspects that are important. Leadership is about managing change in order to achieve set objectives in organizations. A good leader is able to understand the dynamics of change and manage it to ensure that his organization benefits or is not destroyed by the change. The Leader therefore has to also try to predict change in order to prepare his organization to seize future opportunities and mitigate any negatives challenges that are presented by these changes. This means that the leader is both entrepreneurial to identify opportunities that change presents, seize them to benefit his organization and also a risk manager to identify threats to his organization that change brings, to develop mitigating strategies to eliminate or minimize loss to the organization.
Karl Polanyi’s book[3] gives us the opportunity to see the constancy of change through the great transformation that took place in Europe but also to see the critical role of leadership to intervene, in both identifying and exploiting opportunities and also identifying risks and developing mitigating interventions to eliminate or minimize losses to society. Where leadership is weak in seizing and leveraging opportunities and/or identifying and mitigating against threats, society suffers. It is clear that change should not be allowed to happen without human intervention like as is assumed in a laissez-faire[4] state, where the market forces of supply and demand are allowed to operate without government intervention. Where there is no government intervention, the system favors a few wealthy people against the majority poor and creates a big gap between the poor and the rich. In particular interest to me is that the industrial revolution while hailed as monumental in history, it led to the collapse of civilization and polarized society mainly along economic and political lines. Today society continues to be polarized along the same lines but also along social aspects like race, sexuality, religion and other multiple aspects.
It is of great concern that the free market model has become more advocated for by the Western powers, backed by the Breton woods institutions of World Bank and IMF without observing the letter and spirit of the Free market model. The western super powers have practiced unfair trade practices of protecting their markets at the cost of the poor nations and exploiting raw materials from the poor nations for their industries. The Breton woods institutions on their part have given loans to the poor countries with strings attached with policies dictated to them that do not promote their development. The World bank and the IMF that were established after the second world war to rebuild the economies of Europe, offered loans to poor countries on condition that they privatize their economies and allow western corporations free access to raw materials and their markets. These state of affairs have for the most part left the poor countries of the third world heavily indebted, exposed to exploitation by the industrialized countries and condemned the people to poverty and hunger. This calls for the intervention of governments but third world governments have very limited resources and ability to intervene in a world economy that is tilted against them.
While this paints a grim picture for the poor in third world countries, I believe that it presents an opportunity for the Church of Jesus Christ to intervene in reaching out to the poor in ways that empower them. The church as an institution is armed with the life transforming Gospel of the lord Jesus Christ and financial resources that God calls us to be good stewards of. While there’s controversy of how helping the poor by giving handouts has not helped in the past, the church has to figure a way of helping the poor break out of cycle of poverty. While Polanyi does not highlight the role of the church in the great transformation, its my take that there is a direct correlation between Christian revival and prosperity. When the church is thriving, there is better morality in society that allows the economy to thrive as people work hard with honesty and integrity. When the church is not thriving, moral values are lower as well and the economy cannot thrive with cheating and corruption. It’s is therefore important for the church to intervene in the poor countries, not just by sending money but by ensuring that the Gospel is preached in a wholistic way, where the Gospel is preached and people are educated on how they can use their locally available resources to improve their economy. In my context, we are using formal education of vulnerable children and empowering vulnerable adults with business training, giving microfinance business loans and vocational skills training to empower the poor while at the same time preaching the Gospel to plant churches. I believe this is the way to go for the church to do wholistic ministry which empowers the people both physiologically and spiritually.
[1] Heraclitus, Greek Philosopher, Born 844 BC
[2] John F. Kennedy (1963). Address In The Assembly Hall At The Paulskiche In Frankfurt. June 26, 1963.
[3] Polanyi, Karl (2001). The Great transformation. The Political and Economic Origins of Our time. Beacon Press, March 28, 2001.
[4] Laissez-Faire. (French Term: “Allow To”) attribute to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Finance controller general under King Louis XIV of france and associated with French economists called Physiocrats in the 18th century and adopted by Classical economists in Great Britain, led by economist and philosopher Adams Smith.
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