If you go to The Guardian’s website these days you can find a section that is just labeled “Protest.” So now, with your morning coffee, you can get your news, weather, sports – and protests. I found stories there headlined, “Five Fresh Ideas for the Street Art Agitator in 2016,” “Muslim Woman Ejected From Donald Trump Rally After Silent Protest” and, appropriately, “We Are Living in an Age of Protest.”
We sure are. This week alone Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany faced huge protests after her justice minister declared that Arab immigrants – let in under Merkel’s liberal refugee policy – were largely responsible for the mass sexual assaults on women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve and used social networks to coordinate their attacks. President Barack Obama actually cried – that was his unique protest – while trying to channel his outrage, and many other people’s, into fixing our nation’s crazy gun laws.
In my view, this age of protest is driven, in part, by the fact that the three largest forces on the planet – globalization, Moore’s law and Mother Nature – are all in acceleration, creating an engine of disruption that is stressing strong countries and middle classes and blowing up weak ones, while superempowering individuals and transforming the nature of work, leadership and government all at once.
When you get that much agitation in a world where everyone with a smartphone is now a reporter, news photographer and documentary filmmaker, it’s a wonder that every newspaper doesn’t have a “Protest” section.
I asked Dov Seidman, the author of the book “How” and CEO of LRN, which advises companies all over the world on leadership and how to build ethical cultures, for his take on this age of protest.