One of the botherations of being a publisher is how much dross – at least in my valuation, at the moment of reading the material! – I have to wade through 🙂.
But that botheration is more than compensated by the joy of the number of good and even great books that one comes across, from different perspectives.
The latest of these, on the globally-important challenge of leadership, is Uli Chi’s book, born of his cross-cultural and international experience, titled The Wise Leader.
Here is an excerpt from his book, included here by the author’s permission:
From Chapter 1: Wisdom From Above
“I am a mathematician by disposition and training. Mathematics and the physical sciences have fascinated me since childhood. In my teens, I wanted to be a theoretical physicist because I wanted to understand the universe’s inner workings.
Mathematics was (and is) attractive to me because of its beauty and reliability. It provides an elegant way to describe how the universe works in a small amount of mental space. And it is reliable in the sense that its truth doesn’t depend on how anyone feels about it or even whether anyone believes it to be true. For example, the area of a circle is pi times the radius squared. It doesn’t matter whether you believe it, or whether on any given day you feel that it is true or not. It just is.
Further, mathematics doesn’t merely describe simple things, such as the area of a circle. It describes how much of the complex physical world works. One of the significant contributions of science in the last few centuries has been using mathematics to explain complex physical phenomena accurately.
The explanatory power of mathematics made it plausible for me and many others to think that the universe might be describable by and in that sense reducible to a set of propositions about it. That idea captivated me, and I spent a good deal of my early life pursuing mathematics and science as a way to understand truth and wisdom that is universal.
But my pursuit led me to a conundrum. If it is possible to describe all of reality as a set of impersonal and purposeless forces, why is that possibility so deeply dissatisfying to me as a human being? Being intellectually honest, I had to admit that it is possible “that’s just the way reality is.” But, for the same reason, I had to also acknowledge the possibility that the human longing for transcendent meaning and purpose suggests something more. It is remarkable that human beings can accurately understand the universe’s inner workings.
It is equally remarkable that we have a longing to understand the meaning and purpose of that universe. It seems very odd for human beings to have such a deeply ingrained desire for meaning and purpose if there is no such meaning and purpose to be found. Perhaps that’s just the way it is. But perhaps not.
Perhaps humanity is meant not just to understand how the universe works but also to understand why the universe exists. What if humanity’s purpose is to articulate both the insights of science about the intricacies of the universe and the wisdom of the meaning and purpose of that universe and its Creator?
That question brings me to what I want to explore in this book. This book is a culmination of my lifelong journey, beginning with my love for mathematics and science, leading to a longing for meaning that found its fulfillment in the biblical faith and its embodiment of “the wisdom from above.”
The Author
Uli Chi has spent his life practicing leadership in the intersection of for-profit and nonprofit businesses, the academy, and the local church. Uli serves as board chair of the Virginia Mason Franciscan Health System in Washington State, USA; vice chair and senior fellow at the De Pree Center for Leadership in California, and a fellow at the Center for Faithful Business at Seattle Pacific University, USA. He also serves on the faculty for the MA in leadership, theology, and society, at Regent College, Vancouver, Canada.
To order The Wise Leader: https://www.amazon.com/Wise-Leader-Uli-Chi/dp/0802884040