Thanks for talking about Kairos! From The New Ecology of Leadership: “The second kind of time for the Greeks was Kairos, recalling the youngest of Zeus’s immortal sons. This is the time of seasons, of goals and intentions, of activity and opportunity, which the Romans called occasio. It is the time of now; the infinitely fine-grained, perpetual, thin moment of now in which we all live. The time is always now. Youngest sons always seem to be less encumbered than their older siblings, and, when personified, Kairos is depicted as a young man with wings on his feet and his back that allow him to follow a jinking, butterfly course, crisscrossing Chronos’s linear track. He carries a set of scales in one hand and a knife in the other, ready to cut the thread of time. His head is bald except for a long hank of hair on his forehead. The idea was that if you saw Kairos—opportunity—fluttering toward you, you could seize him by the forelock, but if he got past you, it would be impossible to grab his smooth head from behind. One can think of Kairos as the time of leaders. Effective leaders, in deed and in word, are always pointing out the significance of the moment, the present time, and the opportunities it represents. If the logic of management is all about the maintenance of focus (vertical thinking), then leadership is about the restoration of peripheral vision (horizontal thinking, the ability to make creative connections across fields).

Once again, few have expressed the task better than Mary Parker Follett: "In business we are always passing from one significant moment to another significant moment, and the leader’s task is pre-eminently to understand the moment of passing . . . it mean[s] far more than meeting the next situation . . . it mean[s] making the next situation."

Managers meet situations; leaders make them. Managers synchronize watches; leaders synchronize intentions. "