So What?... Are We Doomed to Repeat History?

Yeah, well, I'm going to try to bridge the obvious gap in what people are going to be thinking.

You know, what has this got to do with leadership and with us today? But I have been listening to a lot of podcasts recently, and pretty much in every single one, something comes up, something that some famous...

emperor, leader, king, whatever has done, where I've thought, wow, I've seen that.

I've seen that behaviour in the office.

So recognising we don't have a lot of time to talk about all historical implications, the thing that's kind of pushing me behind this is, if we've already seen this happen before, this kind of behaviour, why would we allow it? Now, why would we kind of let it continue? And so I'm thinking we should be in the office.

We should be thinking more about what's happened in the past.

Leadership should be based on learnings rather than trying to relearn it as an individual.

I'll give you one example.

This is the thing that really kind of struck me.

I was listening to a podcast about the Roman emperors and there was a talk about the forum and how it was a great place for people to collaborate and learn from each other.

except for one person, the emperor.

So the guy that makes all the decisions spends all his time away from them.

He even has his own special route that he walks alone to get to the forum from his palace.

So this can be quite a lengthy walk, like a walk of about 30 minutes each time.

So it's quite a long way away.

So this is isolation.

And I'm thinking when they're explaining some of these outcomes and some of the things that they're saying is one of the things is this guy is completely isolated.

dislocated from reality.

He has no idea what is going on in reality.

So his plans and his ideas, and I'm sure we can come up with examples of politicians that are doing that today.

But I'm really thinking when you're in the office, how often do you see that there is a leader that maybe surrounds himself with a clique or herself? with a clique of people, yes men, yes women, who will just justify everything that they say.

That's

the

teeing off.

I like that.