How To Succeed In Business Without Putting People Last

At some point in your surf­ing escapades you begin to grasp that the pro­found impact of the inter­net on learn­ing is not its vast stores of con­tent, but its abil­ity to sup­port the var­i­ous facets of social learn­ing. You begin to appre­ci­ate that knowl­edge is not just a lump of some­thing that is passed on via var­i­ous ped­a­gog­i­cal tac­tics, and your atten­tion begins to shift from the con­tent of a sub­ject to the learn­ing activ­i­ties and human inter­ven­tions around which that con­tent is sit­u­ated. John Seely Brown iden­ti­fies this as a shift from “learn­ing about” to “learn­ing to be.” And “learn­ing to be” calls for inter­per­sonal skills not eas­ily acquired by text­book learn­ing. It’s in this con­text I found myself read­ing back issues of In Char­ac­ter, which exam­ines virtues within our com­mu­ni­ties our fam­i­lies and our­selves. The cur­rent issue delves into com­pas­sion; this obser­va­tion from Howard Behar who empha­sizes com­pas­sion as a vital com­po­nent of acquir­ing per­sonal lead­er­ship skills caught my attention:

Peo­ple are not assets. Car­ing isn’t just about admir­ing the charis­matic lead­ers, the peo­ple that every­body likes, or the in crowd. This is the big car­ing we do that shows we “care, like we really mean it.” It’s about words and actions that every­body sees and rec­og­nizes. There’s an old adage that says, “Peo­ple don’t care how much you know, they want to know how much you care.”