One of the great ways for leaders to gain perspective on their current challenges is to read history. As I’ve state in past posts about my favorites like Winston Churchill, you can gain understanding, comfort, direction and more from those who’ve faced more difficult situations than you.
I think every leader feels at times as though their burden is unique, but by studying leaders of the past you can see that most leadership challenges have been faced before.
It seems as a leader I can’t turn around without bumping into a leader who isn’t struggling through how to respond to the increased focus on the internet, technology and social media. Whole industries such as newspapers, magazines, television, music, movies and more are being turned upside by a titanic shift in how their content is able to be delivered. Denial by the leaders of these industries in the early stages of the new info/technology development has made the current turn of events even more dramatic. These kinds of shifts aren’t unique in history. In fact, Paul Julius Reuter, the man who started Reuters News Agency, was at the beginning of just such a trend and embraced it with forward looking optimisim and determination.
My first reference to Julius Reuter came while reading Simon Winchester’s book Krakatoa, which detailed the destruction of the volcano near Sumatra in 1883. Winchester details in great clarity in his book how time consuming and unreliable the transmission of information was in that generation. With a dependency on sea trade to keep empires alive, citizens were at the mercy of troubled seas, pirates, ships sinking and unreliable staffing to get information. The explosion of Krakatoa and a handful of other major events in which Julius Reuter was able to beat his competition with fast reliable news made him a successful and rich man. With the invention of the telegraph and undersea telegraph lines Reuter saw an opportunity.
Since the 1950’s he had been trying without great success to get into the business of news, showing incredible creativity and persistence along the way. He hired agents to row out to passing ships in order to receive news faster than other agencies and at one point set up a group of homing pigeons in order to bridge the gap of telegraph lines between Germany and France. He would do anything in order to get the news to people faster. His big breakthrough was when he immediately grasped the future of news and hired agents at key strategic points worldwide that would be near the terminus of a telegraph line to pass on news. Armed with news hours and sometimes even days ahead of others, he was able to sell subscriptions to the newspapers of the day.
Reuters still exists today, undoubtedly due to the fact that it managed to maintain the forward looking perspective of it’s founder.
So what’s the application for leaders today?
1. Be a communication futurist! Clearly the fundamentals of leadership remain unchanged. We must connect with people and develop common goals and plans to achieve our mission. But the means by which we are able to communicate and the speed and ubiquity which we must compete with are ever changing. Here at the Tacoma Rescue Mission we are committed to helping the poor, forgotten, hungry and lost of the Northwest. Nearly 100 years ago we communicated with those people much differently than we do today. I’m encouraging all of our staff to get engaged in social media and use the content they are ALREADY creating in the service of others – to bless others that might not be inside our doors, but on the internet. If we keep looking for new ways to communicate we’ll always be able to fulfill our critical mission.
2. Be a Need’s futurist! Look forward and imagine scenarios of how you can “fill the gap” of a need that exists today. Julius Reuter saw an opportunity while others were looking at a problem. Certainly there were many who thought that “we’ll just wait till the ship docks to get the news reports” who were soon rendered irrelevent by Reuters desire to fill the need of getting people news. If you’re goal is to positively fill a need in the lives of others, you will always have a bright future. Industries come and go, but people need people and the growth of technology doesn’t change that. In fact, it often enhances our need for real interaction. How might our needs change with people connecting through more ‘impersonal’ such as facebook and twitter?
3. Don’t give up! Reuter was persistent. He had many false starts and sometimes got a story wrong, sometimes terribly wrong, but through persistence he was able to create a reliable, fast news service that became one of the most successful of it’s age. So many times people give up, when what they should be doing is persisting and experimenting. Failure means that you have to keep tinkering in the development of your dream. Don’t abandon hope. Just try again more intelligently.
Links re: Paul Julius Reuter
2. Google search: Paul Julius Reuter
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