Leadership for Sustainable Development From the Perspective of a Woman Physicist

Abstract

What skills make a great leader? What policies lead to great programs? Answers to these challenging questions must be formulated and implemented by leaders who are successful regardless of the type organization interested in sustainable development. Leadership from both a career and an organizational viewpoint will be discussed from the perspective of a woman physicist. Implications of laws of classical and modern physics will be used in this discussion as tools for tailoring tactics for coarse‐ and fine‐tuned guidance systems for successful leadership aimed at sustainable development. Specifically, implications of Newton’s first, second and third laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation from classical physics are applied to leadership. The results are interpreted against the more refined findings of both quantum and chaos physics theories that indicate our inability to precisely predict outcomes of any event. Also, the refined theories support the notion that everything in the universe interacts with everything else in the universe at some level, so that nothing is completely isolated from anything else. Therefore, skill sets and program policies based on an interacting, all‐inclusive, or holistic approaches are the ones that are most likely to generate great leaders and great programs, since these are the ones less likely to omit significant factors that could contribute to creation of great leaders.