Getting Started on”A Failure of Nerve”

I just started (again) Edwin Friedman’s A FAILURE OF NERVE: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix. I tried once and my class load overwhelmed me. This time I going through it with a few friends so I have some accountability. Friedman is a Jewish Rabbi who had a standout career as a professor and marriage and family therapist. His consulting extended beyond families into military, business, and governmental arenas.

After reading the 30 page introduction, I don’t think I’ll need much external motivation to keep going (though it’s not an easy read by any means).

Here’s a brief summary from the intro that represents his thesis:

“I believe there exists throughout America today a rampant sabotaging of leaders who try to stand tall amid the raging anxiety storms of our time. It is a highly reactive atmosphere pervading all the institutions of our society — a regressive mood that contaminates the decision-making processes of government and corporations at the highest level, and, on the local level, seeps down into the deliberations of neighborhood church, synagogue, hospital, library, and school boards. It is “something in the air” that affects the most ordinary family no matter what its ethnic background. And its frustrating effect on leaders is the same no matter what their gender, race, or age.

It is my perception that this leadership-toxic climate runs the danger of squandering a natural resource far more vital to the continued evolution of our civilization than any part of the environment. We are polluting our own species. The more immediate threat to the regeneration, and perhaps even the survival, of American civilization is internal, not external. It is our tendency to adapt to its immaturity. To come full circle, this kind of emotional climate can only be dissipated by clear, decisive, well-defined leadership. For whenever a “family” is driven by anxiety, what will also always be present is a failure of nerve among its leaders.”

-Introduction, pg. 2