This year's graduating seniors at Northwestern University heard three great leadership lessons from their commencement speaker, Illinois Senator Barack Obama. The lessons came from his own extraordinary life, and if the graduates are wise, they will model their own lives on what Obama told them.
Barack Obama is the son of a white American mother and a Kenyan father who left the family when the boy was just two years old. He was raised largely by his mother's parents in a modest home in Hawaii, where Obama managed to get into a top-ranked prep school and then went to New York's Columbia University. It was in his freshman year there, he told the Northwestern graduates, that he learned his first great leadership lesson: "The world doesn't just revolve around you" -- you have to learn to see things through other people's eyes.
He was partying too much and studying just enough to get by, he said, and one night he and his friends spilled a lot of beer, broke a lot of bottles, and trashed the dorm so thoroughly that a cleaning woman, viewing the wreckage next morning, broke into tears. To his credit, that shook Obama, and so did his girlfriend when she told him, "That woman could've been my grandmother, Barack. She spent her days cleaning up after somebody else's mess." What he had, he concluded, was an "empathy deficit." And so does our country, he told the graduates: "We lack the ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes; to see the world through those who are different from us -- the child who's hungry, the laid-off steelworker, the immigrant woman cleaning your dorm room."
Mike Abrashoff learned that lesson as captain of USS Benfold, a dysfunctional guided missile destroyer that he was determined to make into the best damn ship in the Navy. He realized that to do that, he would need the active help of the crew, and he set about getting it by talking with every last one of them, 310 men and women, one by one until he really got to know them. They were a mixed lot, many of them from disadvantaged backgrounds and with very little education. A hotshot young officer might be tempted to think of them as losers. But when he got to understand them -- their home lives, their backgrounds, what they took pride in, the dreams they all had -- he saw that they could be winners, and their strong points could make up for their weaknesses. And together, they succeeded; in less than a year, Benfold won the coveted Spokane Trophy as the best ship in the Pacific Fleet.
Barack Obama warned the Northwestern graduates that they live in a culture that discourages empathy, where those in power tell us that the poor and homeless are lazy or weak, that inner-city children can't and won't learn, that innocent people being killed in distant lands are someone else's problem. Don't believe it, he said -- "because you have an obligation to yourself. Because our individual salvation depends on collective salvation. And because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you will realize your true potential -- and become full-grown."
About the Author:
Donna Carpenter is an award-winning writer and editor and founder and chief executive officer of Wordworks, Inc.
Article source: http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976823779.
