Soul of Leadership
I
f you look at your world, you will find an impossibly long list of problems and crises. It's no wonder that many choose to do nothing. The task often seems too
He met with and learned from the people themselves and found that in every malnourished village, a few families were simply not starving. Sternin's idea was to apply so-called 'positive deviance' and locate 'bright spots'. These are people whose exceptional behaviours create better results than their neighbours having the exact same resources.1 They discovered that some mothers actively fed their children the same quantity but as four meals a day instead of two, and they collected tiny shrimps and crabs from the rice fields and crushed them into the meals. They also added low-class sweet-potato greens to the diet. Sternin simply empowered these mothers, who they called 'bright-spot' mothers to informally teach others to do the same. Within six months 65% of the children were better nourished – and they stayed that way. When Sternin passed away in 2008 he had left a legacy. What are you a 'bright spot' for? That's where you have the potential to lead. Are you a leader?
big; the responsibility, often, too great. And so, instead, we wait for a leader. But, what if you are that leader? And what if it's not as difficult to lead as you think? In the 1990s Jerry Sternin, an ordinary man, was given what seemed an impossible task: to help alleviate the starvation crisis in Vietnam. And to top it off, when he and his family arrived in Vietnam, he was told his deadline had been cut to six months. Imagine if that were your role, what would you do in six months? Jerry looked at the traditional list of problems and reasons for the severe malnutrition among the rural people: lack of education, poverty, poor sanitation and lack of access to clean water and swiftly declared these as 'TBUs' – true but useless. He then chose a very
non-traditional approach.
ODYSSEY?70
•?
DIGIMAG