Thank you Paul!
I am honored to accept an appointed seat on the Fedora Board and looking forward to the year ahead.
Having served as the secretary to the Fedora board for roughly the past two years I’ve recorded a lot of meetings and tracked a lot of discussions–a majority of that time saying very little except to clarify the issues being discussed for the minutes or nudging the discussion back to the topic at hand. This has served as a great unintended education into how Fedora functions and what issues are important to it. I’m looking forward to putting this experience to great to use.
I am also looking forward to helping lead Fedora into the future. At a recent Portland State University (PSU) project management class, Paul Spindel, an excellent instructor and facilitator, encouraged us to think about our responsibilities and to ask ourselves how much we are “managing” versus “leading.” Managing is thought of in terms of “managing” day-to-day operations and keeping things from running off the tracks. Managing is a very necessary thing to do, but it is different from leading. Leading is an activity that seeks to take things to the next level, to “lead” a project or organization forward to new and greater things.
When we think of leaders, we recall times of turbulence, conflict, innovation, and change. When we think of managers, we recall times of stability, harmony, maintenance and constancy. We need leaders and we need managers. Both are essential to making social systems work. But each plays distinctively different roles. And the unique role of the leader is to take us on journeys to places we have never been before.
–Exerpt from The Leadership Challenge by Kouzes.
I think this is a fantastic quote and how I hope to contribute as a leader to the Fedora Board. This quote was in our course book with attribution, but so far I haven’t been able to find the exact page in “The Leadership Challenge” by Kouzes & Posner (4th edition). So far it is a good book. 🙂
