Quote:
Originally Posted by BPetry234
What is the future of FIRST?
I'm not talking about next year, or five years from now, or even twenty. Where will we be in fifty, seventy, one hundred years? As the founding mentors and staff start to retire their shoes are filled. Will the future leaders still install gracious professionalism and coopertition in their students they way Dean, Woody, and our mentors do today?
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A way to look to the future is to look back to the past. Go back 20 years from now and look at science and technology and the roles of politicians and world leaders then. The global communication/network/impact. Then go back 50 then 70 then 100. Spend some time looking at this history and its impact. Look at the present and within the scope/span of this last 20 years, look at the leaders who have developed in FIRST, in teams, as individuals, and look at their tracks. Their track record. How telling is the record they are leaving? Look at the Hall of Fame teams and the WFAs. How telling are the tracks they are leaving? Then look at the college mentors now, the recent college graduates, the young engineers and technologists that have entered the field in recent years. What tracks are they planning to leave and what are they leaving? Are they handling their careers and their FIRST reputations well and with integrity as they grow, mature, learn? Are they still open to the wisdom and the experience their older peers and mentors are willing to share and pass down?
Pessimism, mismanagement, narrow thinking, tunnel vision, closed minds, and disregard for history and for the bigger picture are some of the ways that could impact FIRST over time, molding it into something it was not founded to be. Time brings change, there is no stopping it. Leadership guides that change and we know there is bad leadership as well as good leadership. There is also a a level of excellence in some of our leaders. Those are the ones whom I hope our young ones are listening to and paying attention to as FIRST continues to expand and develop and they begin to leave their tracks to be followed.