What is servant leadership anyway? What does it have to do with motivation, alignment, and purpose? I’ve been reading and thinking about that lately.

When I first heard the term “servant leader” I immediately thought I understood where it came from. Many of the worst managers I’ve seen seem to gravitate towards the role because of ego and a desire to be seen as better or more successful than others.

Boiled Frog Syndrome is a lie.

The story goes that if you put a frog in scalding hot water it will immediately jump out, but if you put the frog in a pan of cool water on the stove, and gradually raise the temperature it will just sit there and think happy froggy thoughts until it boils to death.

I wondered if that was actually true. Rather than conduct an experiment myself (much to the relief of neighborhood frogs and everyone else, except perhaps my cats), I looked it up. It turns out to be, as Dr. George R. Zug put it (a curator of reptiles and amphibians at the National Museum of Natural History) “bull****”. Frogs jump out of the water when it gets uncomfortably warm.

Our first dog was a border collie. Border collies are canine Einsteins. She usually knew what I was going to do before I did. All I had to do was think about going for a walk and she’d jump up from where she was studying calculus or quantum physics or something, and grab her leash.

But she was slow to learn that fingers pointed at things. To be fair, hands often contain treats or toys, so it pays to keep an eye on them. It took me a long time to teach her to look where I was pointing, and I don’t think she was ever really comfortable with the idea.