How to use your freedom to choose in Linkedin

The post Knowledge leaders: ye shall know them by their achievements, whose summary says “Learned along the way, the story told here is a lesson of the important role that local and network knowledge leaders can play. I understand that this lesson applies to any organization,” shows the byproduct of how I used my freedom to choose as a discussion leader in two Linkedin groups. Next is an explanation of how I am trying to help other Linkedin discussion leaders that become aware of being prisoners of Cartesian managers can use their freedom to choose to “find meaning in their suffering and dignity in their prison existence.”

In the international bestseller “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” Steven R. Covey tells the story of Victor Frankl, who “… began to become aware of what he later called ‘the last of the human freedoms’ – the freedom his Nazi captors could not take away. They could control his entire environment, they could do what they wanted to his body, but Victor Frankl himself was a self-aware being who could look as an observer at his very involvement. His basic identity was intact. He could decide himself how all of this was going to affect him. Between what happened to him, or the stimulus, and his response to it, was his freedom or power to choose that response.”

Covey adds that “[t]hrough a series of such disciplines – mental, emotional, and moral, principally using memory and imagination – he exercised his small, embryonic freedom until it grew larger and larger, until he had more freedom that his Nazi captors. They had more liberty, more options to choose from their environment; but he had more freedom, more internal power to exercise his options. He became an inspiration to those around him, even to some of the guards. He helped others find meaning in their suffering and dignity in their prison existence.”

Now Linkedin members will see how most Cartesian group managers keep those members that try to become discussion leaders in prison. In the preface of the second edition of his book “The New Economics,” the late W. Edwards Deming wrote “This book is for people who are living under the tyranny of the prevailing style of Management. The huge, long-range losses caused by this style of management have led us into decline. Most people imagine that the present style of management has always existed, and is a fixture. Actually, it is a modern invention – a prison created by the way people interact. This interaction afflicts all aspects of our lives – government, industry, education, healthcare.”

Although members that have been in Cartesian prisons since school years have not develop their imagination, a discussion leader should emulate Victor Frankl until he has more freedom that his Cartesian captors.