"Natural" Leadership

Here’s a little profile of a “natural” leader:
“...alpha male Lody models compassion and leadership skills for the troop. When his good friend Kidogo was dying of heart disease, Lody carried him around, served him the tastiest morsels of food and was visibly depressed when he died.
“Lody has adopted orphans, cradling and nurturing them for weeks, and regularly assisted a blind, elderly bonobo by leading her around the enclosure. When Milwaukee acquired Brian, a troubled young bonobo who’d been abused by his father, Lody mentored him. Other troop members were disturbed by Brian’s behavior and picked on him. But through Lody’s intervention, Brian was accepted into the group, and it appears that he – not Lomako, the son of dominant matriarch Maringa – may end up being Lody’s successor.”

These paragraphs are from an article on the Milwaukee Zoo in Milwaukee Magazine. It just made me smile thinking about how helping others to do the right thing, that is, transformational leadership, is really easy enough and natural enough that monkeys do it! It seems that modeling leadership is actually a part of preserving the species...what it takes to survive in the wild.

The view from Sri Lanka

Emi Kiyota, who spent a month living in a nursing home to discover how to best design environments for elders in Culture Change Now Vol 3, is taking on a new challenge. She and her colleagues have just returned fromSri Lanka where they were looking at the current and future states of eldercare.

As you will see in her blog Sri Lankans value community and a happiness based on that community and relationships, not material things. Because these things are so valued in society in general, they find it from the start of value for their elders. We are lucky to have Emi sharing her insight. I can’t say enough about how inspirational I found her blog and the amazing things happening in Sri Lanka. So, I’ll stop writing and you just go see for yourself.