Leading at the Edge #4 Chapter 6 & 7

**Just a quick clear-up about my blogs:

My first experience with blogs was last term. I've never written blogs before but it was fun looking at other people's views on different topics. In my spring term I always wrote a draft and later on published them because I wanted to think about what I was writing for some time so I can write from a wider perspective and in-depth detail. But from now on I will publish them as soon as I write them. Also, for the blogs that aren't text related I thought we were allowed to talk about things in life but from reading blogs of others I finally understood that wasn't the case. When Ken said other than the text I thought he literally meant something other than the text but now I know he meant about class. Whoops. Sorry Ken! I'll publish one about the book and one about class starting this week!

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Like the author said in the intro of Chapter 6, Chapter 6 was similar to Chapter 5 in ways of taking care of others to work together. On page 102 it says, "People understand the need for legitimate authority and for differences in salaries, roles, and titles" I though this would be a topic debatable in an International Relations class. Maybe in theory even Communism needs a superior like the government to foresee equality among workers but how did this theory come about? Why is that for example in a company the boss might not do anything but get paid more than the workers? Isn't that unfair? I understand the legitimate authority part but I was confused by the latter part. I wanted to know the reason behind this statement. I think the example that the author gave about his first job after graduating Harvard was similar to the example Ken told us in class about a boss who always sat at a simple desk near the elevator so he could talk to the employees. 

Chapter 7 was about Conflict. We've already talked about this a little in today's class. One of the solutions to solve conflicts that the book sated was "to talk through the disagreements ... but the truces were only temporary."So I guess talking didn't work but Shakleton used "teamwork" again. The book describes that being emotional is bad in conflicts and I remembered it was also bad in negotiations as well. "Moose on the Table" reminded me of another idiom but I forget what it was. Was it the big elephant in the room? The story about Frank Hurley showed that people actually do better when they are seen and praised. I think people who make others feel special are the ones who become leader-like figures. At the end of the chapter it said, "It is vital to decide which battles are worth fighting and which are not." I said this in my last blog post but I think this is really true. Fighting all battles is not the smartest thing to do because it makes the atmosphere bad when it involves people and you can lose energy and become stressful.