Julia Kirby of Harvard Business Publishing has just written a lovely post about the Stanford d.school CIA team behind the push to turn part of downtown Palo Alto in to a pedestrian zone. It's titled Starting a Movement, Learning to Lead. Here's an excerpt:
So you tell me: is Creating Infectious Action a course in leadership? To be sure, it doesn't focus on individuals' leadership journeys. There's no competency model at its heart. But what is leadership all about if not creating a vision of something different and better, getting people excited about it, and mobilizing everyone to cooperate in accomplishing it? If you can go out there and create infectious action, I'm inclined to call you a leader. And if you can't, you probably shouldn't call yourself one.
As I wrote in my post about Seth Godin's recent talk at TED, you can't manage a movement, but you can lead one, even cultivate
one. So yes, Creating Infectious Action is a course about leadership, where leading looks a lot like cultivating a garden.
Man, what a great team. This makes me so happy.
I saw this video and thought it was an interesting example of creating infectious action a small scale. A little bit of weird from one person inspired the masses.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA8z7f7a2Pk
Posted by: Tyler Stalder | 03 June 2009 at 01:45 PM