ABSTRACT
For more than 100 years, scholars of leadership have been harvesting their schemas from the soil of industrial thought. Our understanding of leadership has grown from ideas such as effi ciency based on mechanization, the increase of speedy transportation and communication, and the extraction of natural resources for use as fuel. But as Rost (1991) suggests, while the prevailing school of leadership remains stuck in the industrial paradigm, “much of our thought and practice in other aspects of life have undergone considerable transformation to a postindustrial paradigm” (p. 100). In response to Rost, what could be more “postindustrial” than an agrarian farmer? What could do more for leaders and scholars who are “still caught up in the industrial paradigm” than to leave the factory and head back to the farm? Here is a metaphor, concrete and available to the imagination, that can inspire new thinking about leadership.
