This may be your best chance today to tap into your inner philosopher, if you find that an attractive option.

Jaworski, Joseph, Introduction by Peter Senge. Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2011.

seventh-century ascetic, John of the Ladder: If some are still dominated by their former bad habits, and yet can teach by mere words, let them teach. ... For perhaps, by being put to shame by their own words, they will eventually begin to practice what they teach.

Peter Senge: What are we, collectively, able to create?

The overarching principle … would be one of servant leadership, serving with compassion and heart, and recognizing that the only true authority for this new era is that which enriches participants, and empowers rather than dimishes them. It would encourage "transformational leadership": leadership of strong commitment and broad visionary ideas.

Leadership is all about the release of human possibilities. One of the central requirements for good leadership is the capacity to inspire the people in the group: to move them and encourage them and pull them into the activity, and to help them get centered and focused and operating at peak capacity. A key element of this capacity to inspire is communicating to people that you believe they matter, that you know they have something important to give.

When people join together and go beyond their habitual way of being as a group, even more possibilities open up. But somehow a kind of block prevents these extraordinary experiences from happening.

People and groups think of themselves as separate. But if we could learn how to dialogue with one another at a deep level, … we would find ways to relate to one another that would dissolve the perception of separateness. …

One of the most important lessons I learned about the traps was how simple it can be to regain balance when we've lost the flow. Consider the act of walking--a wonderful and powerful metaphor for thinking about this issue. When we're walking or running, we're always in the process of literally falling down. When we move our body forward, we are actually "falling." But we have learned to move quickly and deftly, and so we are "falling" into our next step. If we don't move instantly and with great dexterity, we will fall on our face. As children, we learned our lesson well about the phenomenon of walking and running so that when we're off balance, we can almost effortlessly correct ourselves, regain our balance, and continue on our way. In ordinary life it's the same way. We lose our balance, as I did for months on end, because we don't understand enough--we don't see we have simple ways to regain it.

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one ... the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. --George Bernard Shaw

We are more certain of the direction than the goal, and each day we ask for guidance to take the next step. … We never see the whole landscape, so we take the next tiny step and improvise on what we've learned.

All matter and the universe are continually in motion. At a level we cannot see, there is an unbroken wholeness, an "implicate order" out of which seemingly discrete events arise. All human beings are part of that unbroken whole, which is continually unfolding. Two of our responsibilities in life are to be open and to learn, thereby becoming more capable of sensing and actualizing emerging new realities.

…the domain of generative leadership--how we can operate day by day to participate in creating new circumstances, new realities.