Notes from Educause 2007: On the Subject of Leadership

摘要

Both within and beyond the traditional tracks in which the annual Educause conference divides itself, other sub-themes tend to emerge. Several of the sessions I attended were noteworthy to me for their focus on leadership, each in different ways and with varying aims. The first session was the keynote kick-off presentation, titled simply "Leadership", given by Doris Kearns Goodwin, popular historian and friend to recent presidents, particularly Lyndon Baines Johnson and Bill Clinton. For Educause, Goodwin was an offbeat choice for keynote, as she has no formal university affiliation and is certainly not a part of the IT world. But, with her talent for riveting narrative and personal storytelling, she knocked the socks off. She received a standing ovation from a typically hard to please audience, on the ready to refocus on laptop screens, iPhones, and the next session to catch in the event of a "ho-hum" presentation. Imbedded in her stories was a list of leadership qualities that the presidents she has known and, still more notably, the one she had studied for more than a decade - Abraham Lincoln - either had or did not have. In the case of Lincoln, he had them all, and Goodwin described the lessons of leadership we can all learn from his style. To summarize, the following are the qualities of leadership that Lincoln applied in very real ways, and often under extremely trying circumstances: