Attended an interesting talk yesterday over on the Whiteknights campus, where John Hendry introduced Prof Keith Grint of Warwick University, who spoke around his paper “Leadership and the Sacred: Separation, Sacrifice and Silence” to an audience of faculty from the Business School. Yiannis Gabriel, of the School of Management at Bath, provided commentary as response.
The paper explored our ideas of leadership, between ‘heroic’ and ‘distributed’ poles, and via the etymology of the concept he expanded on three aspects of the sacred (seperation, sacrifice and silencing opposition and/or anxiety) as they refer to the concept of leadership. Keith’s presentation was generously dotted with examples old and new from literature, culture and history, and it made me think of some of the later work of Gregory Bateson, who was also interested in the importance of the concept of the sacred in our understanding of the nature of living systems.
Food for thought.
As an aside, it’s been a long while since I went from the Greenlands campus in Henley to Whiteknights at Reading , and the first time I’ve used the library there. The students all seem so young! Or do I just feel old?
Chris Dalton's Personal Development Blog 
Chris,
all the students at Whiteknights are really young – it wasn’t an optical illusion