The Servant as Leader
Robert K. GreenleafThis revision of the 1970 edition of The Servant as Leader is the fruit of much helpful criticism, and more is welcomed. It is offered again not as a final or complete statement, but as a record of thinking in transition that is drawn more from experience and searching than from scholarship.
Behind what is said here is a twofold concern: first for the individual in society and his bent to deal with the massive problems of our times wholly in terms of systems, ideologies, and movements. These have their place, but they are not basic because they do not make themselves. What is basic is the incremental thrust of an individual who has the ability to serve and lead.
My second concern is for the individual as a serving person and his tendency to deny wholeness and creative fulfillment for himself by failing to lead when he could lead.
Overarching these is a concern for the total process of education and its seeming indifference to the individual as servant and leader, as a person and in society, on the assumption that intellectual preparation favors his optimal growth in these ways when, in fact, quite the reverse may be true.
Part of the problem is that serve and lead are overused words with negative connotations. But they are also good words and I can find no others that carry as well the meaning I would like to convey. Not everything that is old and worn, or even corrupt, can be thrown away. Some of it has to be rebuilt and used again. So it is, it seems to me, with the words serve and lead.
--- Robert K. Greenleaf