Building Community – A Social Movement - By Rick Williams
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Authority Magazine asked me what social movement I wanted to launch or hoped someone would launch. My answer was in the full interview published HERE. In this newsletter, I expand my comments and share my hope that you will contribute to a movement bringing us together into a stronger community of shared values and goals.
Most of the 50,000 readers of this newsletter have a leadership role in their organization. My message today asks you to contribute your skills and experience to your community. You know the importance of teamwork and community. I hope you will participate in a movement to bring teamwork and community back to our cultural and political institutions.
Please see my note below about my new book, Create the Future. It can be your guidebook for making better decisions for your company, your community, and yourself.
What Social and Political Movement Will Create a Better Future?
Movements that improved the quality of our lives include the civil rights movement, woman’s liberation, ending Western colonialism, and protecting the environment. Some movements have made our lives more difficult, including anarchism, religious and ethnic absolutism, and Communism.
I worked as a leader of the anti-Vietnam war movement and the environmental movement. Both movements transformed the US and the world. I ran for the US Congress because I believed the United States needed a new generation of leadership. We certainly need that today.
We are experiencing a moment in human history when the way we communicate, educate, live together, create, make decisions, and procreate is changing rapidly. We have more control over our own lives, and our role as individuals within our families, the companies we work for, and our community is evolving. We question our obligations to each other and our community and our role in our community. These changes will drive the next generation of social and political movements and create a world different than what we know today.
Most information about what is happening in the world and the total accumulation of human learning is available to everyone today, essentially for free. We can communicate worldwide with anyone. We can create books, art, and mass communications with few, if any, limitations. The institutions we developed to assemble and propagate knowledge are no longer unique citadels of knowledge. What is the role of Harvard University and Oxford today?
We are choosing which voices we listen to rather than all of us listening to a common narration of what is happening in the world and its meaning to us. Mass media has moved from “All the news that’s fit to print,” and “Without fear and without favor” to being an echo-chamber for an audience demanding only one point of view.
We, the public, have access to most information used for government decision making. We make judgements about whether these decisions make sense. Leaders of institutions who believe they have superior knowledge and understanding of how things should be done are challenged by individuals who believe they know what is best for themselves and their families and want to control their own lives and future.
Excessive government control of people’s lives and businesses during COVID destroyed 100 years of public confidence in vaccines and other important public health practices. The public questions the role of government institutions and, by extension, other public and private institutions. They do not trust major institutions to act always in “the public interest” rather than the interest of one political or business advocacy group or another.
Churches, mosques, synagogues, and other religious institutions served as centers of community. Attendance dropped when these institutions disconnected from their members lives and became social activists rather than welcoming community builders.
In the US, minority advocacy groups control the Democratic and Republican political parties rather than broad coalitions of interests where compromise is required. In New York City and my state of Massachusetts, elections are won in the party primaries by the largest fractional vote rather than a majority vote. Minority activists hold power, and compromise and coalition-building are discouraged.
At a moment when we, as individuals, are liberated as never before, we feel isolated, lonely, and unsure of who we are and the life we want to live. Do we want the commitment of marriage? Do we want the responsibility and burden of raising children? Will we find community in a house of worship? Do I have a commitment or obligation to my employer? Will speaking up make any difference? We have lost our sense of belonging to a “community” and even a family, in many ways.
Change is slow and difficult. We, as individuals, strongly resist change. We, as established institutions, strongly resist movements for change. The civil rights movement in the US required decades of courageous step by step work by leaders and individuals. When I drank from a “whites only” drinking fountain in North Carolina as a teenager, electing a black president of the US was not imaginable. But it happened.
I strongly believe in the power of individuals working to solve the problem before them. They are the primary source of innovation and problem solving. At this moment, when many barriers have come down for us as individuals, I hope we will re-discover the value of community and rebuild a trusting relationship with each other and evolved governing institutions.
I hope to see a movement to rebuild our sense of community. I hope we can rebuild community in our politics, our media, our houses of worship, our workplaces, our community centers, and our homes. I hope we will find a new understanding of how I, as an empowered and unique individual, can belong to a community of shared values, ideals, and history without being siloed by my gender, race, religion, or ethnicity.
The ferment we experience today will bring forward movements that challenge how we govern, educate, communicate, and live with each other. Some movements will be misguided and exploited. But this drive to change the balance between governing leaders and the governed is how we grow as a civilization. The struggle to find the right balance between the powerful – government, corporate, and institutional leaders – and the governed, the public, is the story of human history since the Greek and Roman civilizations.
I hope to see the day when a Harvard faculty member wears a MAGA hat into the Harvard Faculty Club and another member says, “Thanks for being here. You make us stronger.” I hope to see the day when a dad alienated from his gay son welcomes him to Thanksgiving Dinner and says, “I am glad you are here. I love you.”
Successful leaders empower their team and all employees to contribute their unique skills and hard work to the organization’s success. We know that working together as a team, as a community of shared values and goals, is required for success. I hope you will do what you can to bring these values to the social and political world where you have influence. Build the movement to bring us together as a community.
Your Guidebook for Making Difficult Decisions that Will Create the Future
My book, Create the Future, is your leadership guidebook for making difficult decisions. I encourage you to see that you create the future for your company and yourself by the decisions you make today – by the choices you make today.
Hurbert Joly, former CEO of Best Buy and now at Harvard Business School, describes Create the Future as, “your invaluable resource for decision-making in turbulent times.”
You make decisions within the context of the big wave changes to our technology, society, demographics, and political governance. CTF will help you understand these macro dynamics and make realistic choices for the company that achieve your goals, risk preferences, and values.
For more on Create the Future and how you will use it to guide you and your team click HERE.
We Are the Same, and We Are Unique
Each of us is unique, and we are the same. We want to belong – to be the same. We want to be unique – to be who we are.
A flower is a flower is a flower. I view the bed of blooming flowers with joy. I look at each unique bud with wonder.
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