This TED talk was given by Derek Sivers and is called “How to Start a Movement.”  I thought it was really interesting because he used a funny video of a man dancing which turned into a crowd dancing as his example of a movement, but the lessons that he derived from it still hold true.  First, he discusses how leaders start out with only one follower, and when they are starting out, its important to treat the small number of followers as equals because the cause that you are fighting for is more important than your role as a leader because it is something that is bigger than you.  This was my favorite message from the video because I think it is a really important part of leadership.  Leadership doesn’t just mean being in charge of others.  It’s about leading them in the fight for the cause that you are all passionate about.

He also made an interesting point about the first follower.  Sivers commented about how the very first follower was a leader of his own because he showed others that it was okay to follow and join in.  If the first follower hadn’t chosen to join in, then the crowd would not have formed because people wouldn’t have been following anyone to join in.  As followers, we can act as small leaders, so it is important to be an active and public follower for the causes that we care about.  This also reminded me about one of our most recent readings about how we can be leaders even when we don’t realize it because we have so much more impact than we give ourselves credit for.

I’ve attached a ted talk called “Everyday Leadership.”  Drew Dudley starts off by talking about how not enough people feel comfortable calling themselves leaders because we as a society we have started celebrating really great things that only a few people can accomplish and fail to acknowledge and celebrate.  This reminded me of one of our most recent readings and how we have a much larger impact than we give ourselves credit for, sometimes.  He tells a story about a girl who was nervous about going to college and almost didn’t go because she was so nervous, but he was advertising for a student group he worked with and came over to her and her parents and joked with them and she immediately felt more comfortable and decided to stay.  Dudley comments about how he doesn’t remember this moment at all, but it was so important to this girl, that she found him before he graduated and thanked him for what he did.  Dudley had also been joking with the boy standing in line behind the girl and they ended up dating all four years of college and getting married due to how they met each other.

For Dudley, this moment was so small and normal that he didn’t even remember it, but for this girl, it meant so much more.  This shows how our smaller actions can have much larger ramifications than we expect them too and that we should take that extra moment to do a small act of kindness because it can go so much farther for the other person than we realize.  Dudley uses this example to show how leaders don’t always have to be doing these big monumental things that we tend to think they do.  Leaders can be normal people who impact other people’s lives, and it is something everyone can do.

The start of the reading really resonated with me because I often do think about how as an individual I can’t make a change.  But I often correct myself by thinking about how if everyone thought that about themselves and never does anything then no changes will be made, so even if I am just one person I will be a part of the change.  But this reading gave a new perspective on this.  It showed how you can make an impact even when you might not realize it, so whether you are a part of the big change or not, you are still part of something.  I’m not sure how well I explained this, but I really liked this new perspective that is discussed at the very beginning of the reading.

A common theme I saw in the reading was power, which connects to what I saw at the very beginning of the reading.  We often underestimate the power and impact that we have which can limit us.  But it is important to recognize that your power in a situation depends on how much power you think you have, so it’s important to know your power and own it.  The reading had a quote that went along with this: “don’t give up the game before all the cards have been played.”  During this pandemic, it is also easy to feel powerless especially since we are encouraged to stay home.  But there are so many ways that we can help others like making care packages for homeless people, or delivering meals or groceries to the elderly, or even just face-timing a friend that you haven’t talked to in a while because maybe they are feeling really alone and isolated.  This feels a little cheesy to be saying but it’s what I kept thinking about as the reading was talking about our power.

I had to watch the 2004 democrat campaign ads and my favorite was “State of the Union…Not Good.”  They took edited clips of George Bush to make him say horrible things and then inserted clips of the crowd cheering for him.  For example, they took a clip of him saying “I am committed to defeating the good work of charities and the values that bring lasting peace,” and then the crowd starts applauding him.  I liked this ad the best because thought it was really funny and it caught me off guard since it did not have the serious tone that most of the other ads had.

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/2004/state-of-the-union-not-good-web

I also enjoyed the ad titled “The Coalition of Loudmouth Jerks” which showed clips of democrats saying bad stuff about George Bush and then the narrator said, “but when democrats say mean things about the president, it makes the president sad.”  Then it followed with a montage of sad music and somber clips of George Bush looking out of a window and then had a picture of George Bush with an edited teardrop that ran down his face.  I thought this montage and edited teardrop part was really funny since I don’t normally think of campaign ads including humor in them.

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/2004/the-coalition-of-loudmouthed-jerks-web

My favorite ad is kinda old but it is for AT&T.  It’s set in a hospital and a patient is waiting to go into surgery and he asks how the surgeon performing his surgery is and the nurse’s response is, “he’s okay,” and the guy about to have surgery is like “excuse me what?”  Then the surgeon comes in the room yelling, “Guess who just got reinstated?!” to someone else in the hallway as he walks into the room.  He then looks at the patient and says, “well not officially” and then proceeds to ask him “Nervous?” to which he responds, “yeah me too” and then walks out of the room saying “Don’t worry about it. We’ll figure it out.” AT&T then starts talking about how “just okay is not okay” and they are the best network in the country and they have a new 5G network.  I like this ad because I think it’s funny and I don’t ever get tired of seeing it.

This ad makes me think of the Huff reading because although it is not really presenting statistics, at the end of the ad AT&T claims to be “America’s best wireless network according to America’s biggest test.”  What is America’s biggest test?  AT&T is not the only company to do this because somehow every mobile network company is able to claim that they have the best network that you want your phone to be on.  Clearly, they are able to manipulate these claims by only advertising certain information.  And, the ad ends with AT&T’s slogan, “More for your thing, that’s our thing,” and a picture of an award in the font of this slogan.  This is a very generic picture but because there is an award image, it makes you think their claims have more merit than they actually do.

https://ispot.tv/a/IZ6U

One thing the Harvey reading addressed is that “the group comes first” and the guide for this week posed an interesting question: is this a good thing?  I think it is a good thing because unfortunately, power tends to corrupt people and when leaders are too powerful and too self-involved, it becomes problematic.  However,  when groups get too much power they can take on a sort of ‘mob mentality’ so its important to keep a balance of respect for the leader and interest of the group in order to avoid havoc.

I also liked the quote from pg 220 which stated: “the importance of storytelling to leadership – not because stories are more true than other forms of communication, but because, well chosen and well told, they convey a kind of condensed truth.”  I think this quote relates to the systems theory of simplification and its benefits.  The reading mentions FDR’s fireside chats but I also thought of crash course educational videos.  They are another example of how simplification and context are beneficial in conveying a message.  In this case, the crash course teacher/narrator would take the leader role while the students/viewers would take the group role.  These videos also show how the group’s best interest is kept in mind because these videos are made specifically to aid the students as extra resources.

I thought the Zinn reading was really interesting because I love history.  I was also amazed about how much I didn’t actually know about one of the first history stories we learn about in school.  In high school, I had learned that Christopher Colombus was actually a pretty bad person, but I had never learned all of the specifics and this reading taught me the extent of the harm he did.  The article mentioned that by 1650 there were no more Arawaks or their descendants left on the islands because they had all been taken and ended up dead.  This is genocide and it is crazy to me that we are not taught more about the harm that Christopher Columbus inflicted on others.

It is interesting to think of this in connection with the systems theory readings from last week and see the drastic effects that come from oversimplification.  Oversimplification does not only leave parts of the whole story out, but it distorts the story and changes the entire narrative.  Christopher Columbus’s story has been so oversimplified in our history that despite the fact that he committed genocide, our country still has a national holiday for him and has statues and other commemorations of him.

The Mystery and Meaning Reading was very interesting and I am definitely guilty of many of the things that the reading describes.  I am a firm believer that everything happens for a reason, so I am always coming up with different possible scenarios in my head.  I also analyze myself and others because I find it so interesting to understand people and how they ended up as the person they are today.  After reading this, I was glad to know that it’s not just me who likes to have an answer to everything.

However, the reading also discussed how when we don’t have all the information or answers about a person, we use what we have seen in the past to fill in the blanks ourselves.  This made me think of Taylor Swift and how everyone used to say that she dated so many guys and wrote songs about all of them when they broke up because she was probably a crazy girlfriend.  This caused her to get so much hate which is just wrong.  I think this exemplifies what the reading was talking about because the public only knows her through magazines and interviews so they do not know her really well.  So, they used the information they’ve seen in the past, which would be Taylor dating lots of guys and writing songs about ex-boyfriends, and created their own narrative to make sense of it, which is that she was a crazy (ex)girlfriend.  This is only one example of how we can taint someone else’s image to our own eyes and how by doing so we are hurting them.

I’ve learned about the Stanford Prison Experiment in my ldst 102 class and I still can’t believe that happened.  It scares me to think that humans can so easily change and become corrupt once they receive power.  And it makes me wonder why power is so important to us.

It was interesting to read Von Rueden & Van Vugt’s article as it mentioned contingency leadership, transformational leadership, and the leader-member exchange theory which are all models that I have studied in my Organizational Behavior class this semester.   However, like the article mentioned, these theories are mainly applied on a larger scale and not when studying small-scale societies.  I found it interesting that in large-scale and small-scale societies, men usually have the advantage and are usually higher up on the totem pole, even if only by a little bit.  Another concept that we discussed in my OB class was how self-led teams are more realistic in a smaller setting.  When too many people become involved in a focused group, it becomes imperative for tasks to be delegated so that everyone has a purpose and stays focused and does not fight with other group members, so leadership becomes necessary.  But in smaller groups, the whole group knows what everyone’s designated role is and so there is not always a need for a leader to delegate or guide them.  I was very surprised to see the overlap such a direct overlap between these two classes because they take very different approaches to leadership.

I have learned about game theory before in some of my past classes, but this reading gave some unique examples of how game theory can apply to our everyday lives.  It really made me think about larger and smaller-scale situations and everyday encounters in which I use game theory.  I do usually cooperate in group settings and do what’s best for everyone because I have been on the losing side of uncooperative group behaviors before, and feel bad when I cause others a disadvantage.  However, that is not to say I practice this behavior all the time.  I definitely have found myself in a free-rider situation before, like when someone offers to pay for our uber and I don’t fight them too hard on the decision since I want the uber ride but not the cost that comes with it.  I think the only time I’ve found myself in the Chicken dilemma is when I would fight with my siblings when I was younger, but otherwise, I’m not a very competitive person and usually give in too soon to make the group happy.  I have definitely found myself in the Battle of the Sexes dilemma, for example when going out to eat with friends, I want to go eat with them more than I want to go to a specific restaurant, so we spend way longer than we should trying to make a decision on where to eat.  I have also found myself in the volunteer’s dilemma when I was younger and my parents would ask for either me or my siblings to complete a chore and if no one volunteered then we got a punishment.  When I was younger I would usually volunteer since I knew my siblings wouldn’t but as I got older I stopped doing so and made one of them volunteer because I felt that I had given in enough over the years.  I usually don’t think of game theory dilemmas in terms of my everyday life, but realizing how often I am placed in these types of situations made the reading seem a lot more relevant and interesting to me.