"Breathtaking Possiblities" of Servant Leadership

On March 16th, 2006 Don Frick wrote an inspiring comment on my ramblings on “Kleptocracy” that seemed worth delving into. Don wrote, “For me, one of the most breathtaking possibilities offered by servant leadership is the idea that, because humans share an impulse to serve, we can also imagine ourselves as part of a global tribe of humankind. Enlightened artists and mystics have always done this but the shift in mass consciousness began in December, 1968 when astronauts on Apollo 10 sent back the first picture of an "earthrise." Exactly one year later Greenleaf was at work on the first draft of "The Servant As Leader."”


It seemed interesting that I noticed a couple of articles in newspapers the next day from a news release about the findings from NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe(WMAP) satellite mission designed to study the primordial burst of energy that gave birth to the universe in the “big bang”, which the NASA diagram above depicts. (See the article in the Christian Science Monitor or NASA’s WMAP site for more information and the source of the graphic above.)

One of the most interesting things I have learned about Greenleaf (via Don's great biography of Greenleaf) was that this guy who had so much to do with servant leadership was originally studying astronomy. Could it be that “servant leadership” is indeed related to our “recent” understandings about the origins of the universe and ourselves? If Greenleaf might have been inspired to write “The Servant as Leader” from the images of earth from space, what inspiration might come from these “new images” of the "birth" of the universe? And how about the team that is conducting the WMAP research, I wonder if this is a team that naturally practices servant leadership? Or do I need to lay off the coffee?