Leadership Münster

The Initiative Economy Münster (Wirtschaftsinitiative Münster WIN) started in August 2017 a project for management personnel from various fields of the world of employment. They built up a forum which uses the many sources of experience in an urban society for an economically comprehensive and personal development by casting a look “beyond the horizon”. In the process, protagonists get together from most different fields such as management, social work, administration, education, theatre, and science.

In November, “Leadership Münster” visited the Academy.

Beside giving an overall view of the organizational structure of Johannes-Hospiz, describing the different tools of the steering group and explaining the executive functions in the different departments we aimed at characterizing an extended understanding of leadership. It was all about what I call the “inner core of terminal care”, revolving around the question who leads whom or who advances whom. It aims at pointing out a change in perspective. Steering is based on consideration, leading on being led, acting on non-acting. In terminal care, we are attentive to what the dying wants to tell us, what he needs and what is his message to us. This message, namely that in terminal care we are the learners, Hilde Domin has so well expressed in a poem: “Most precious lessons / at the bedside of the dying”.

So what do we learn? We learn the right way to deal with time and to deal with the goods; and we learn self-knowledge, from dying we learn to live in a deeper way. We learn inner guidance. Lao-tse writes in his “Tao te king”: “To learn one accumulates day by day/To study Tao (the Way) one reduces day by day. / Through reduction and further reduction one reaches non-action … Be uncontrived and nothing is not done”.