Nippin Anand 0:00
Hi I am Nippin Anand, great. Welcome everyone, and welcome to embracing differences. I’m joined by three very good friends, Jenny, Craig and Rob, and we are going to explore the idea of leadership. And I know Craig and Rob is have written a wonderful book, which is called following leading. So we will call it following leading in risk series, and we’ll do three podcasts on this and see where this goes. But let me just start with a little bit of an introduction between us. So I will introduce Jenny. Jenny can introduce whosoever she likes, and then this, I think it will flow from there, but we’ll see. So here’s me introducing Jenny. Hello, Jenny. Jenny joins us from from Brisbane,

Nippin Anand 0:49
and I only came to know about Jenny through Rob, he has been consistently telling me to get in touch with a few people in sport. And Jenny, you are very high on that list, and I’m so glad that I reached out to you, but you didn’t respond to me for two years, and suddenly

Nippin Anand 1:11
the light bulb rang and you said, Okay, let’s talk to this, this, this guy who lives in Scotland, and see what he has to say. And what an amazing podcast we had Jenny last week. It was so nice, and so many people reached out to me to say, this resonates so much with me. So beautiful to meet you. Jenny is so nice to to meet another sporian, let’s say, and let’s see where that goes. Yes, yes, yes, yes,

Jenny Krasny 1:39
another sporian. That’s it. That’s a new title I enjoy that.

Jenny Krasny 1:48
I was certainly saying to

Jenny Krasny 1:50
Nippin in my reflection from my last conversation, how, how easy it is to speak with him, but many of our sporians, for the want of a word.

Jenny Krasny 2:02
We can cut through all the small talk and just just get real and get authentic really quickly, which I absolutely value, absolutely value as for Rob. Goodness me, where do I start

Rob Long 2:18
Rob? And I love that. How long have we known each other? Jen, I reckon it’s 15 years. It’s about that. Absolutely it is about that. And

Jenny Krasny 2:31
I cannot remember what

Jenny Krasny 2:34
what brought me to you in the first place, but I know it had something to do with a sport workshop you were doing in Brisbane that I know, and I certainly remember that quite fondly, it was where I met a bunch of other sporians, of which I still stay in touch today and have wonderful conversations with. But then Rob and I continued chatting, because I decided to embark, at the time on a PhD, and I needed a friend.

Jenny Krasny 3:06
And Rob said to me, I’ll be your friend anytime, but be prepared. I’ll be your critical friend. So sometimes I’ll I’ll be caring and nurturing, but at other times, I will

Jenny Krasny 3:19
be honest and authentic and telling the truth, and Rob delivered all of that, being being a friend, and being a shoulder to lean on, but also sometimes being appointed shoulder to lean on,

Jenny Krasny 3:33
and times when I maybe didn’t want to hear it, but I needed to hear it, that being said

Jenny Krasny 3:40
throughout those many years, Rob has been my sanity check. Rob has reminded me of what the true north is. Rob has also reminded me

Jenny Krasny 3:51
about anchoring to myself and what’s important, and seeing the world for what it is, and helping me uncover and unveil the institutionalization that happens when we’re in big organizations. As much as we try and

Jenny Krasny 4:11
stay independent of it all, it is ridiculously challenging to think that we can stay we can stay independent from from our context. Our context is constantly driving us in, and we do become part of that as much we might think we’re not. So Rob has has always been a rock in the sense of somewhere to come back to, somewhere to call home, somewhere to to find a friend and a hug and maybe a pointy edge every now and then, but also to remind me of what it means to be to be human and not lose sight of the person that’s behind it.

Rob Long 4:55
Yeah, that’s great thing because, because I’m going to drop that boring. Language and just keep the human. Because I think, I think really, that’s what I started all this out with Craig, many, many years ago was, I think we discovered that not just in industries or in leadership or in management or in institutions, I think both Craig and I discovered at least 30 years ago that what was really missing was the human person, and so sporian is really not about sporians at all. It’s about can we be more human in how we relate to each other? So I’ll just say a little bit about Craig. I actually think Craig and I’ve known each other for more than 30 years, but in different aspects and and I’d say also this with you, Jen, we’re never afraid to talk about our faith as well. And I don’t just mean religious faith. I just mean our faith in being human and being who we are and being vulnerable to others and not being afraid to be that vulnerable person, whether it’s about being a friend or being a critical friend, and so yes, Craig and I met a long, long time ago through the avenue of learning and teaching and education. So nothing to do with risk at all. It was all about schools and universities and stuff like that. So, yeah, Craig and I, really we, we kind of tic tac off each other so much we don’t even know we’re doing it. And when we do training programs together, it’s like, if we did preparation, it’d be annoying, you know, like, we don’t really need to even prepare. That’s how familiar we are with our complementary styles. And we’re certainly not the same, and we don’t agree on quite a number of things, but that doesn’t, that doesn’t make a difference. In fact, it makes for greater diversity and for greater enriching so I’ll hand to you.

craig ashhurst 7:23
Craig, Thanks, Rob. Yeah, I think we’ve had many decades, and to the extent that we even forget some of the things that we’ve worked through together, which so I had my own company for probably five or 10 years before Rob started his and I think we’ve just got used to working through similar issues. And yes, we apply it to risk, but we’re applying it to all the issues that people are facing in organizations. And one of the things that keeps coming up is that we’d like to find like minded people, you know, like Jenny or other people. And Rob started talking about this guy, Nippin, and I hadn’t met him, but he was going, Oh, he’s got an anthropological background, and he’s, he just gets it, and so on. And then eventually we met, and yeah, it was very much a sense of, yep, another like minded person. It was more a finding of similarity. So yes, spore is a particularly technical approach to risk, if you like. But what we find is that people’s own background where they’re recognizing the underlying issues that are not only human, but based in a differing worldview. So it’s not just a worldview of technocracy or your standard control and all that sort of stuff, but a worldview that’s actually saying life is really complex and we need to understand it. We need multiple disciplines to comprehend it, and when we apply that to risk, then we actually start seeing it’s a very different approach than I was reading an audit today that just stank. It was just, you know, a policeman. Hello, hello, hello. You haven’t done this. Then, rather than I could even read from what they were saying, no question about what was the person facing when they confronted them about this tiny issue and made a big thing out of it. So to me, Nippin is very much in the same realm. His whole background, particularly all of the ships at sea and everything, is just so different from anything I’ve had to do with but so similar in the sense of trying to get below the standard stuff to what are the things that matter? Back to you.

Nippin Anand 9:48
Nippin, yeah, great. Can I ask everyone that if you can mute your side, if when you’re not talking, it would help very much to keep the. The conversation, more, you know, free from the noise in the background. It also helps a lot when it comes to the final recordings. Okay, on that note, let’s start, Craig, maybe you can, or Rob, if you like, you can start with the what is it that we want to explore in the next, you know, half an hour or so. Let’s just talk about that.

Rob Long 10:22
Well, I’ll hand you, Craig, what’s your current perception of leadership discourse? Because we did that online workshop recently, and I know you did a lot of background work for that, so I’d prefer to hand to you for that, because that gave us a real timeline and status of flow of what leadership’s been about for the last 30 years. So I’ll hand to you, okay,

craig ashhurst 10:51
and if I get the sharing right, I will be able to share a presentation, if it works,

Rob Long 11:10
didn’t Nippin Have to give you permission or something.

craig ashhurst 11:21
Sorry. It just doesn’t anyway. Yeah, anyway. So, yeah, when we were looking at doing this workshop, Rob and I divided and conquered and I looked at the literature. And there were a couple of really good reviews that were, you know, checking out the literature over the last 40 years or so, and one of them looked at the evolution of leadership theory. And there was broad agreement that generally back in the 1800s mid 1800s it started with this idea of the great man, the great leader, and natural born leaders, always men. And then in the 1930s and 40s, they started to move into traits of leadership. What are the characteristics of effective leaders? And that was partly related to what happened in the war, and partly a sense of who should lead in the war. So again, primarily men and primarily in almost a military setting. Then in the 40s and 50s, they started to look at behaviors and the actual actions and skills of leadership. So moved from who is the person to what things can we actually train people, you know, and what sort of things do they need to do to be good leaders. And then in the 60s, they started going, well, hang on that. That’s all very generic, but it changes depending on where you’re at. So it became contingent and situational, and very much leaders responding to different things, but still almost all the way through all of that, predominantly male on the top control, often using military and American sort of examples. Then from the 90s, it started to spread out a bit and do some new things, including transformational stuff. You know, how do we look at different ideas of how leaders help teams to transform and to become better? How do we share leadership? How do we actually have followers included and then collaboration? The idea of person centered, we actually have a bunch of people doing the leadership together, collective servant leadership, inclusive and and complex. But the other thing that I found was that all of those were still there with just the random person, sort of shouting in the wilderness all the way through so that you still had Christian stuff way back talking of servant leadership, and you still had anthropologists doing stuff. So it’s most of that’s within the management literature, and yet in the education and that sort of area, the concept of the relationship between the teacher and the classroom was much more about servant and, you know, a whole lot of things that management literature is only just starting to look at. So that was broadly what I came up with.

Rob Long 14:39
Good Craig. I thought the group really like that. I’ll just say one brief thing. I was forced this year. I’ve been off LinkedIn for 10 years or 15 years. I was forced to join it. This year, my university made me join um. Having not been on it, I think, for nearly 15 years. And this is just a perception I have never witnessed so much utter noise and clutter and egotistical. Marketing, promotional, sloganeering, branding, stuff in my life before I was like, I’m so glad I’d I’d been offered for 15 years, but if LinkedIn is evidence of the current state of leadership, then I would say nothing’s changed in 50 years, and there’s nothing new.

Jenny Krasny 16:01
I think the most profound thing of all of that Rob and I’d agree, I think everything that Craig mentioned around the evolution of leadership or non evolution, I know that’s not a word, but I’ll make one up. While things have moved, they haven’t moved, and we see that a lot, particularly in heavy industry, high risk industry, where those scorecards or behavior cards or, you know, taxonomies around how a leader should be, while they might be evolving and more words are appearing, it still feels like it’s built on the masculine. It’s still built on those attributes from years ago, and with all of the movement around trying to be a little bit more inclusive and bringing all walks of life into the picture, that scorecard and those dimensions haven’t shifted, and yes, the argument is, well, in theory, we should all be displaying those things. Unfortunately, though, the yardstick by which we measure those things is not the same. We still have conversations today that we’ve been having for 1520, years about you know, leaders today need to be assertive, not aggressive, not submissive, assertive. However, if a male is assertive, that’s amazing. We celebrate that. If a woman’s assertive, well, she’s not assertive, is she? She’s a bitch, for example. So not all behaviors and attributes are equal, even

craig ashhurst 17:46
today on on that I was once asked to do some remedial coaching for a female executive, and when she walked in, she was young, attractive and outspoken, and within about five minutes, I said, would we be having this discussion if you were a bloke? And she said, Nope, but she had just, you know, and there was nothing that I could see that was an issue. So I ended up having to write a report back to the board of saying the problem are your other executives who are all the males. And didn’t go down well,

Jenny Krasny 18:25
no, that is and that is still our reality, and we find that I’m delighted to see some more women moving up the ranks. Not that I want to play this card of female male. However, many of those women are still struggling to find or reveal their voice. They’re they’re they’re using a voice that is heard at the table, but it’s not always their voice. It’s the voice that is accepted and not rejected. So we still have a long way to go. Any fronts I’d like to add to

Rob Long 19:01
that, Jenny, I My observation is more around the idea of a masculine a style and a feminist style. And even the word feminist in itself is considered by some people, as, you know, regressive to the 1970s or something I’ve not heard, particularly within the world of risk and safety. I’ve often, apart from that video series I did with you, I’ve not heard anyone talk about what actually a feminist perspective on leadership is, I’ve not heard it. It doesn’t mean there isn’t one, but even the people who call themselves women in safety simply declare a masculinist narrative about leadership, and they don’t even know they’re doing it. So I think. You know, it’s more about it’s more than just gender. It’s more philosophical and a world view. Because I see masculinism About undeclared power, and I see feminism as very much anchored to what I would call care ethics, which has been around for about 3540 years. But you know, the Australian Institute of the health and safety made sure when they released their body of knowledge on ethics that they never mentioned care ethics. And of course, that is completely missing. That whole idea of that ethic is missing completely from the world of risk, and I don’t want to get caught up in gender. I think it’s more about a world view, which is why Craig and I wrote the book following leading as equal and mutual. And that incorporates those two world views in dialectic with each other. So, yeah, I’d go even further. I think it’s sad. It’s a long, long way to go before I think we will hear anyone articulate not a gendered worldview, but a feminist worldview of leading. Yeah.

Nippin Anand 21:22
I Yeah. No, sorry, you want to go first. That’s fine.

Jenny Krasny 21:27
No, I think I was simply saying that. I think that that’s a that’s a good level set Rob, because when I, when I talk about female male, that my head wasn’t trying to play the gender card, I think that lovely definition of masculinity and femininity is far more than what most people symbolically think of man and woman. So, yeah,

Nippin Anand 21:50
I mean, I can only draw from my perspective. I have at least two worlds that I’ve lived. One is the the the maritime world, and the other one is the Aberdeen combined with oil and gas world. And there is a museum in Aberdeen, and it’s called the Art Gallery, if you go there, there’s a telling image of Aberdeen, which starts from fishing to granite to where it is today oil and gas. And it’s what is common across all these three industries, is that Aberdeen has always been a very masculine work, work culture. And what’s interesting is that, you know, we talk about gender, for example, how helpless the gender becomes when you place it within the context of masculinity and femininity. Is that you walk into an office and you shake hands with a woman, and you realize that your hand starts to pain. Give you such a firm handshake. And I think years and years of conditioning sometimes pushes, you know, you to move into that direction. And it’s, it’s, it’s so difficult. It must be so difficult for women to actually, you know, maintain their femininity in this very, very masculine industry, the oil and gas world. And Aberdeen is a classic example of that. The other one is that an exercise I did last week, and I was actually surprised by my own self, where I gave a group of ship managers a word, which is called Man overboard. And I was doing, you know, what we call language audit, in in in social psychology of risk, and how would an interesting phrase man overboard, that it leaves no imagination at all about a woman falling overboard, a Woman going overboard, that imagination does not even exist. And you grow up an industry, industry. You spend almost a decade more than that in this industry where everything starts from how you’re conditioned through your language in a ship is always addressed as a she and a she is always commanded by a gray hair, you know, middle aged man. So you already have the dynamics of what we call in Hinduism, the male controlling the woman, or the culture controlling the nature. And it’s a fascinating dynamic in which you are born and you spend so many years, and you realize that, and today, the industry is stuck. It’s really struggling to bring the perspective of women to have a broader representation of women in boardrooms, all the way up to the up to the ships. But very little thought is given to how our language is actually or how our symbols are actually holding us back by you know, so we are trapped in our own language in many ways and and it doesn’t allow us to move forward. So it’s very hard in some sense, to look at a woman leader in position, woman captain in position. And I’ve interviewed and podcasted so many, had so many podcasts with with women seafarers, and one particular story comes. To mind where a woman Captain lands on a ship and the male Captain refuses to hand over the control of the ship to her, plainly, because she is a woman and she is just has to come back home. And you’re wondering an industry that is really, really struggling today with having a very acute crisis of of of talent and and people, is ignoring 50% of their demographics, plainly, because of its own biases. It’s just fascinating to observe that, yes,

craig ashhurst 25:32
the other thing Nippin That came out of that literature was both the gendered aspect, but also the American individualism. So in terms of the worldview dominating very much in the management area, so much is from America, and it’s the individual hero male, but I think we’ve covered the male aspect, but it’s the individualism that, to me, is so critical, compared to looking at the fact that they’re not just there by themselves. You know, the whole thing of leadership implies there’s a whole bunch of people involved, but they only ever talk about the leader.

Rob Long 26:16
Think you mentioned language, but it’s also metaphor. Metaphor. I was brought up in a family. My father was clergy. The church was only males could be ordained, and women were called the weaker sex. And so I was brought up with that metaphor for 20 or more years till I left home. But I think we need to be careful, particularly in the area of risk and leadership, which is why we wrote a book called following, leading and the following comes first, not the leading comes first, and it’s why we didn’t use the word leadership, but we use the action, the participle of leading and following is to be much, much more conscious of language and what we’re saying in our language, And that we cultivate and normalize a culture by our metaphors and by the words we accept within a workplace, a company, an organization, they all have cultures, and we let things slip. So for example, I would like $1 for the number of times I’ve criticized someone who talks about soft and hard skills, right? I my radar goes up and I just go, no, no, no. It reminds me of how my father used to talk about my mother. You know this, this weakness idea? Well, there’s no, I say to these people, there are no soft and hard skills. There are only people skills and non people skills. So change your metaphor. Get rid of soft and hard and you’ll change the culture of leadership, leading where you work. And people think, oh, surely not No, surely Yes, the metaphors and the language we use shape that culture. And you know, I think it’s so profound, you know, it’s so profound that that all you’ve got to do is write a book called following leading. Now do a search for that on the internet of following hyphen leading, and there’s no other book on the planet that uses that structure of following leading. So it’s still incredibly, the the leadership sector is still incredibly hog tied and bound down by its metaphors, which they accept, like soft and hard, and no one blinks at it, except maybe in Spore, we do but, but in in any other area, I hear all this soft and hard stuff, and just think, how’s anything going to change if you keep talking like that?

Jenny Krasny 29:30
And then many of those people who talk like that move to other positions of authority, whether it’s in an organization or it’s in an association or an Industry Association, and then it continues. I mean, even last week, I overheard some leaders talking about a workshop they’re attending this week where their joke was, yeah, someone thinks we someone thinks we need to learn skills on how to soften up. I. I cringed, I squirmed very visibly.

Nippin Anand 30:04
Yeah, Craig, maybe it will be a good idea, because a lot of people can still grapple with this idea of the hero myth that you described around leadership. I think the thought that we give so much attribution to this individual, you know, for all the success and for failure, we turn towards the poor frontline worker. Maybe there’s a need to talk about that little bit, I think so maybe you should say a little bit more about that. I think it would be fantastic to hear that. Thank you.

craig ashhurst 30:39
There’s always been a few radicals in the management theory. And Mintzberg, to me, is one of the best authors, and he spoke about looking at things like the Harvard Business Review. So that was the lead journal that all these leaders would watch, and almost all their stories was the same thing. Here’s a problem. The hero leader comes in through his own intelligence and greatness solves the problem, and the whole thing’s fixed. And having looked at the Harvard Business Review, you suddenly go, oh, yeah, they are all like that. So there’s no looking at who else was involved? What were all the hardships? Where did it not work? Where’s the vulnerability? Where’s the reality of what goes on? It’s it’s this sort of mythology which, in many ways, without trying to get too political, is now exemplified in Trump and what’s happening there with America, trying to pretend that there’s still this great hero President, to the extent that he’s making these claims of success, while the actual enemy that he’s bombing is saying, No, the straight isn’t open and but he’s saying, No, I’m I’ve solved this. You know, it’s all fixed. So it he almost exemplifies the complete emptiness of that mythology, but it’s sowing ground that that’s what leaders expect, that they have to do. And I’ve done a lot of executive coaching, so before getting involved in risk, most of my work was in strategy and leadership, and almost all of the executives that I spoke to had the imposter syndrome, you know, the sense that someone would eventually find out that they really weren’t as good as as they thought. And the reason for that was because they had this mythology of this leader who was, you know, almost Trumpy and God like and they couldn’t live up to that image. And part of the coaching was just in saying, Well, nobody’s like that, but it’s ground into all of the stuff they read and the sort of expectations. And then very similar, I think, to the concept of zero in risk, where it’s got this mythology of everybody has to have this, and if we have zero, then we are superior to other people. But everybody in the ground is going, that’s just crap. You know, there is no such thing as zero, and there are no such leaders as these great heroes or God like people.

Nippin Anand 33:18
Yeah. And just to build on that, you know, as you read books on leadership, and this is a great one that Rob recommended to me. And I, I actually got this book from him whilst I was in Canberra. But I think from what you said, you know, attributing so much power to to the to the one person, I think underneath all this also lies another problem, which is that, as human beings, we don’t like to think independently. We need somebody who can guide us, most of us. So how do you then resolve that issue that there’s so few people who actually want to lead, who actually want to be leaders, and I tell you have so many examples on board ships where I’ve served, where somebody’s offered a promotion as a captain, and they say, No, I’m very happy as a subordinate, as a chief officer, because I don’t want to take that responsibility. So, you know, so I suppose that that’s also something that I don’t know, what’s your thoughts are

craig ashhurst 34:18
on, that I’ve got a great story. So I was a crew trainer at McDonald’s, so we’re not talking a high, fancy business or whatever, and it was the best privately owned McDonald’s in Australia. And the company took it over and drove it into the ground. And one of the things they tried to do was it used to have, these days, where all of the staff would come along and help clean stuff up and do things, and they couldn’t get anybody to come along and do it, because they were mandating it. But you had to come out of your own time. Whereas the guy that previously owned it was a billionaire, and he used to provide all sorts of stuff, and. Then we get a holiday, you know, all sorts of things. And it was just this great community thing. So there’s the general manager is complaining to me about it, and I said, Well, all right, look, leave it with me. And so I just got on the phone, rang people and said, Look, this poor bastard, he doesn’t know what he’s doing, you know, let’s just help him out. And so we ended up getting everybody to come along. Now to me, that’s part of the problem with the command and control leadership. There’s no relationship, and so that sense of, I don’t want to step up and lead. No, they’re not saying that. They’re saying I don’t want to step into the position where I’ve got to be an asshole and everybody’s going to hate me, whereas, if it’s just relationship, it’s like, yeah, oh, okay. And then you actually see people recognizing that other people have good ideas, and then they’re happy to work with that. So I think that that story for me has stuck with me. Of the difference that it was no biggie for me and I was just doing what everybody always used to do, but I was one of the last people still in the organization.

Nippin Anand 36:05
Jen, would you like to say something?

Jenny Krasny 36:06
Yeah, oh, it’s I’m just thinking. So my mind goes crazy when all these conversations happen. It’s like a bubble machine that doesn’t stop, but it certainly does. Does have me think about the conversation we were having earlier about the scorecards and what frame of reference people anchor to. And I often, even in my work, people say, How do you do it? And I say, well, it’s I don’t have a formula, I don’t have a phrase, I don’t have a label, but it’s about relating. It’s about connecting. Or as Rob would say, it’s the it’s the hyphen, it’s the breath in between. It’s, it happens in that space. There aren’t words. It’s, it’s a and so it’s difficult, though, when you then talk about the individualism, you go through a process of a job interview, and they they don’t want to know what we did. They want to know what you did, so that heroine mythology is reinforced. And sometimes, when the simple act is, well, I just made a phone call, and everyone came along, really, that’s all it was. It’s got to be more than that. And then you’re struggling for words, and then you’re told, Well, you don’t have the technical expertise to fulfill that role, when, in fact, all it was was we made a phone call, I reached out and asked a friend, I invited someone into the conversation, and look what happened. But that clearly isn’t valued as significant enough. That’s what was going through my head.

Nippin Anand 37:47
Excellent. And you know what I’m thinking, as all of you are speaking is that we sometimes tend to underestimate even the meaning of what is experience. All About. Experience is not technical. You know, there’s no such thing like technicalities or technical skills, and non technical skills are soft and hard when you grow through the ranks, so to speak, there is so much that you learn in terms of how to work with people. And I think, sadly, what is missing in many domains and the maritime world is is highly, highly experience driven. The first thing you see is the finding ways to cut short on experiential learning. And I think a lot of humility of a leader actually comes from experiential learning. When I quit C in 2006 we never had to send people to leadership courses, never people were naturally good at becoming good leaders by the time they became ship captains. Of course, they all had a different style. Some were more authoritarian, some were more empathetic, but in the end, they knew that taking care of others actually works in their favor, in everyone’s favor, because, you know, Sea is a place where all this will very quickly come to the surface. And if you can’t get along with people, you can’t, you know, you can’t move an hour without that. So I met leaders who were very charismatic, were very, very good at taking care of people. Super cool when it comes to transiting through Singapore Straits, Malacca Straits, we used to actually feel very jealous of some of them. How do you navigate with such such cool mindedness, and we have so much traffic around but then you realize that they have learned it through experience. They have learned it through through failures. They have learned and grown out of it. And I think a lot of social skills, the ability to remain calm, to have a good conversation, to understand another person’s perspective actually comes from that experiential learning, hit and trial and everything else, and we underestimate all of that today. And I think there’s something there that needs to be understood, and we haven’t really well. Maybe we. Do that in a future episode. But there’s something profound there that we are missing, I think, yeah,

craig ashhurst 40:06
which is very much where Howard Gardner looks at he has three stages of learning, your sort of innate, natural learning, then your Scholastic, what you’re taught at school, and then the mastery learning. And when he looks at models, he looks at apprenticeship models, because an apprenticeship model is experiential. It’s not only experience because you are passing on theory as well, but it’s a relationally based model that is totally different from going to a union, sitting in a lecture theater with 300 other people, where you may as well just record it, because there’s no interaction.

Nippin Anand 40:50
So where are we now? We have, we have at least touched upon the hero myth in leadership, and we have looked at the the ethics of femininity and masculinity, which is interesting dynamic. Is there? I think this is a great place to maybe bring this together now and make way for the next session next Wednesday. How do you think, is there anything else anyone wants to, wanted to add or Yeah,

Rob Long 41:19
but I’ll just say one last thing, yeah, one of my one of my heroes, is a guy who wrote a book 2000 years ago, his very first letter to a group of people, and they asked him what life was about. And he said, Well, he said, if you follow what I do, then there’s no more Jews, there’s no more Greeks, there’s no more free and there’s no more slaves, and there’s no more male and there’s no more female. There’s no difference between any of those. And in the first century, under Roman rule, that was one of the most radical things you could possibly say, that there was no more differentiation between nationality, gender or power according to ethnicity. That was 2000 years ago. Have we? We come far from that yet, you know, we’re still racially profiling people. We’re still, you know, denigrating immigrants in Australia. It’s like, it’s like, until you get those barriers broken down and those boundaries taken away, how are you going to build relationships with people if you’re busy casting judgements on them? So, yeah, that would just be my last little bit.

Nippin Anand 42:40
Craig, would you like to say anything before we bring it together?

craig ashhurst 42:46
Only for the listeners to take in context that we are merely talking about the current context, which in one sense, the whole reason we’re doing this is we’re not happy with the current context. So it’s not that we’re being negative, it’s more that we’re just saying this isn’t good enough, and so next week is looking at what we think we could do better, rather than it just being a winch.

Nippin Anand 43:09
Yep, excellent. Jenny, what would you like to say before we leave?

Jenny Krasny 43:15
I concur with all the above, and largely because I often get invited into many conversations to talk about, how has industry changed? How have things evolved? And I think I end up disappointing quite a few people when I say we’re still having the same conversations we were having when I started in the industry. Not really much has changed. Yes, there’s some women in places they weren’t women, and there’s some people of color in places there weren’t people of color, but fundamentally, it’s still the same landscape. So I look forward to seeing how we start to unpack what a movement towards what we what we aspire to. Could be possible, wonderful.

Nippin Anand 44:03
And I think this is a great place to end this conversation and follow up next week with the following leading in risk. And yeah, if you enjoyed watching this, we please subscribe to this channel, and then we will, we will do more of this in the next few weeks. Thank you for listening.