Blog about Leadership

Its has been a little more than one year, but I have finally made it home this week.  I have been able to spend some great time with my nieces and my nephew who are all young at 1, 2, 4, 5, and 8 and children truly are the joy in life.

My oldest niece is all exited to be starting kindergarten in the fall; I hope that she will maintain that excitement for many years in school.  My sister, her mother, has been using the “big girl going to be a kindergartner” to teach my niece some the most valuable lesson in life and those lessons are important for leaders to remember as well.

Robert Fulghum wrote about the most basic tenants for leaders in his book “All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten” and the tenants ring true every day of the year.

What I learned in Kindergarten:
• Share everything.
• Play fair.
• Don’t hit people.
• Put things back where you found them.
• Clean up your own mess.
• Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
• Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
• Wash your hands before you eat.
• Flush.
• Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
• Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
• Take a nap every afternoon.
• When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
• Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: the roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
• Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup - they all die. So do we.
• And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned - the biggest word of all - LOOK.

These are so fundamental that it’s surprising how we forget this as we grow up.  Imagine today, how different our world and, even just our communities, would be if we remembered and lived what we learned in kindergarten.

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