Patience –
A Virtue..
Patience is not just sitting around doing nothing. Instead,
the Greek word we translate as “patience” actually means “hopeful endurance.” Or, another way of defining it is “expectant waiting.”
Example One: This
kind of patience is akin to waiting
on tables – with God as our customer.
* In this mode, we stand by keeping a close watch on
God’s table, waiting to take His order the moment that He is ready.
*
In this mode, we stand by keeping a close watch on God’s table, waiting to take
His order the moment that He is ready.
*
And then we burst into action to ensure that His order is implemented quickly
and effectively.
Example
Two: Another analogy that describes this kind of
expectant waiting is that of a commander
of a military unit in war time waiting for the General’s orders to spring into
action.
*
As the troops wait, they do not sit idly by twiddling their thumbs.
*
Instead, they spend their time in constant training for the upcoming action and
in maintaining their equipment.
*
This is called a state of readiness that takes a lot of work to maintain even
as they await their marching orders.
Patience –
A Vice..
Conventional wisdom holds that leaders exercise
patience. It is said to be a mark of maturity and the path to lucid, maximally
informed decisions.
But this is a grave misreading of an important
principle. It’s meant as a caution
against impulsivity, not a general rule favoring timidity of thought and
action.
Patience is not a virtue in leadership. It’s a vice.
An addiction fueled by risk aversion,
political correctness, self-preservation, and the timeless bureaucratic
preference for slow, status-quo protective, lumbering organizational behavior.
When these things predominate, patience is often touted as the legitimate mask
for many illegitimate pretexts.
A patient
bureaucracy will never retain its best people, because it will be too satisfied with itself. This
will make it disinclined to accommodate the sought-after latitude of those
driven by genuine zeal to improve and advance all they touch … those who are,
by their nature, innovators who want to lead their own self-constructed systems
and own the results.
Ask yourself … when’s the last time someone innovated
effectively through bureaucratic means? When’s the last time someone designed a
novel tactic because they were being “patient?” Now ask the opposite questions.
The answers tend to reveal a lot.
One of
the hardest things to do in a bureaucracy is to kill a rule … because every
rule has an attached constituency that will fight to maintain it. The energy spent fighting rules — most often in vain
— is not spent innovating, meaning our best people are focused internally
rather than externally. This explains
how enemies are time and again able to surprise us. They make better use of
their intellectual energy than we do. Patience is the vice keeping us enslaved
in this cycle of entropy. We’re too patient with that which deserves to be
destroyed, with prejudice, on the basis of common sense and operational
necessity.
George Granville remarked that “patience is the virtue of an ass, who treads beneath his burden and
complains not.” He was right. Patience is not a virtue. It’s a vice. A vice that dampens our zeal to
trample mediocrity and charge towards excellence in what we do
No comments:
Post a Comment