The Art of Chaordic Leadership - by

The Art of Chaordic Leadership - by Dee Hock
HERE was a time a few years back when for one brief moment the essence of leadership was crystal clear to me. Strangely, it was after leaving Visa and moving to a small, isolated ranch for a life of study and contemplation, raising a few cattle. I was attending to chores in the barn, comfortable and secure from the wind howling about the eaves and the roar of torrential rain on the tin roof. Through the din, I became aware of the faint, persistent bellowing of one of the cows. Awareness gradually rose that the bellowing was unusual.
Flashlight in hand, I plunged into the storm and worked my way across the pasture in the direction of the sound. On the far side, in the circle of light from the flash, I could make out Eunice, the huge, one-horned mother cow. Sheltered in the corral to await the imminent birth of her calf, she had somehow gotten out and sought a private place to give birth -- unfortunately, on the brink of a steep bank fifteen feet above a flooded creek which raged through a ravine choked with poison oak and wild blackberry vines.
I raced to the spot and saw from trampled ground and smashed bushes what had happened. She had given birth. The calf, struggling to gain its feet, had slipped over the edge and plunged down the bank into the creek, then desperately tried to climb the sheer bank to get free of the water. Eunice had done all that she could, racing up and down the bank, bellowing and searching in vain for a way down. By the time I responded to her cries, the calf had been swept downstream beneath tangled vines and brambles.
Grabbing at limbs and bushes, I half fell, half stumbled down the sheer bank into the creek. Pushed by the rushing, icy water, I worked my way under and through the thickets and brambles. In a bend of the creek a hundred feet downstream, I spotted the exhausted calf fighting to keep its head above water. By the time I arrived, it had given up and was submerged. I pulled it onto a shelf of rocks beneath the mass of tangled growth and began pumping its ribs trying to eject water and assist its breathing. It was a magnificent, dark-red, bull calf, the hair on its flank a mass of curls, its soft hoofs torn and bleeding from efforts to climb the bank. It revived a little and began to kick and struggle. Pocketing the flashlight I managed to heave it across my shoulders and began a struggle upstream to the place where I had entered, and might have a chance to climb out.