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Your institution may have existed since 1785. But its leaders haven’t.
I live in Boston where gravestones from 1693 and even earlier are common sights. Oh, how we revel in our colonial roots! We’ve built an entire tourism industry around nostalgia, which serves us well in times of non-pandemic.
In a time of pandemic, though, history can only help us so much.
Yet a reliance on history to sustain our institutions seems a popular view. I’ve heard many folks, from school leaders to government agents, assure me that the organizations we have relied upon for hundreds of years have weathered great crises before, and will weather this country’s current public health catastrophe in kind. Messages to the tune of, “This storied academy has survived the Spanish Flu. World Wars, recessions and the Great Depression. Coronavirus isn’t going to bring us down.” These bastions have faced the financial, managerial and emotional setbacks of wartimes and other crises and emerged more resilient.
These kinds of extrapolations baffle me, because they exclude a very important variable: the people. As leadership has proven a key determinant in whether countries have managed to flatten the curve of COVID-19, the people are the secret sauce. It’s true that many corporations and non-profits have withstood epic storms and unforeseen horrors. However, it takes an especially…
