Marx's Future-focused Leadership: preparing schools for tomorrow's realities

Future Focus Book Review

Marx's (2006) book entitled Future-focused Leadership: Preparing Schools Students and Communities for Tomorrow's Realities, presented some useful information in understanding and navigating today's complex and troubled schools and academic systems for aspiring administrators and other educational leaders. The purpose of this essay is to reflect on this writing and explain how the author's arguments are relevant or not in this quest for knowledge and understanding.

Marx begins his book by highlighting the importance of total or general understanding as a key to becoming fully integrated into a leadership role in a community. This is the essence of the book as this key concept helps present an holistic approach to becoming well respected within a group of diverse personalities and opinions. Marx claimed that since change is ever present an ever moving, leadership must expand its horizons if it to keep up with the times. He wrote, "Considering the vast array of talents, interests, abilities, and intelligences that students bring to the classroom, this noble effort will depend on people who are not only specialists but also connected generalists. More and more, educators will be expected to have broad interests and a constantly developing range of knowledge and skills."

Part 2

Marx continued to explain how leaders must remain connected to all aspects of the career. Scanning and knowing the different inputs that compose any situation is essential to become a successful observer and ultimately a successful leader. Marx provided some helpful tools to assist the reader in this process. The first step in scanning is to understand the environment and all the components of this organization. Deliberate scanning techniques of both the external and internal factors of the environment are of the utmost importance to determining the correct ways of action and administration.

Marx offered specific techniques such as polling and interviews, focus groups and brainstorming as effective ways to help leaders scan and become intimate with the particular environment they are within. The importance of these methods were summed up by the author when he argued "if done well and in the proper spirit, the scanning processes can generate excitement and produce a cascade of valuable thinking. Rather than producing fear about change, involvement in the scanning process can increase esprit de corps and open our eyes to real and possible opportunities, cautions, and problems that need our attention."

Part 3

Marx concluded his book with ideas on how leadership can create a vision of the future and how important this process is to producing well educated students while balancing the political and administrative acts of a complex educational system. He stressed the importance of developing scenarios as a useful way to help create this idea of the future, he described them as simply "alternative futures."