Brief Leadership Quotes

People will change their habits quickly IF they have a strong reason for doing so.

A lot of us say this about cheerleading: Most of the time it’s not fun. It’s hard. It’s exhausting. You’re putting your body through all this pain and hard work and long hours of working out. And we do it all for these brief moments of success. Whether it’s winning a championship, mastering a skill, or having a successful full out in practice—those moments of success are exhilarating. That’s why we keep coming back and putting in the hours.

How do tyrants hold on to power for so long? For that matter, why is the tenure of successful democratic leaders so brief? How can countries with such misguided and corrupt economic policies survive for so long? Why are countries that are prone to natural disasters so often unprepared when they happen? And how can lands rich with natural resources at the same time support populations stricken with poverty? Equally, we may well wonder: Why are Wall Street executives so politically tone-deaf that they dole out billions in bonuses while plunging the global economy into recession? Why is the leadership of a corporation, on whose shoulders so much responsibility rests, decided by so few people? Why are failed CEOs retained and paid handsomely even as their company’s shareholders lose their shirts? In

In brief, leaders with motive and power bases tap followers’ motives in order to realize the purposes of both leaders and followers.

By adopting an agile mindset and providing improved engagement, collaboration, transparency, and adaptability via Scrum's values, roles, events, and artifacts, the results were excellent.

Self-discipline is central to the leadership of institutions and to reforming them. A favorite saying of mine is "Never miss a good chance to shut up." I won't tell you how many times in a congressional hearing I just wanted to scream. How often in the White House Situation Room I wanted to say, "That's the dumbest idea I ever heard." How often in a briefing at the CIA or the Pentagon I wanted to tell someone where to stick his PowerPoint slides. Senior leaders want to blow off steam-shout at people- all the time. But to be an effective leader, you have to suppress those urges.

Our first post-election call of 2020 was at 1:00 p.m. on Friday, November 6. Following our opening prayer, we moved into leadership reports, where Kevin, Republican Whip Steve Scalise, and I briefed the membership.

hope that going forward, even when I am no longer here, people with power can show creativity, courage and leadership. Let them rise to the challenge of the sustainable development goals, and act, not out of self-interest, but out of common interest. I

The key is to take five minutes at the end of staff meetings and ask the question, “What do we need to communicate to our people?” After a few minutes of discussion, it will become apparent which issues need clarification and which are appropriate to communicate. Not only does this brief discussion avoid confusion among the executives themselves, it gives employees a sense that the people who head their respective departments are working together and coming to agreement on important issues.

Agile coach: The individual is an agile expert who provides guidance for new agile implementations as well as existing agile teams. The agile coach is experienced in employing agile techniques in different environments and has successfully run diverse agile projects. The individual builds and maintains relationships with everyone involved, coaches individuals, trains groups, and facilitates interactive workshops. The agile coach is typically from outside the organization, and the role may be temporary or permanent.

We should be careful, though, not to judge the Aché too quickly. Anthropologists who lived with them for years report that violence between adults was very rare. Both women and men were free to change partners at will. They smiled and laughed constantly, had no leadership hierarchy, and generally shunned domineering people. They were extremely generous with their few possessions, and were not obsessed with success or wealth. The things they valued most in life were good social interactions and high-quality friendships.8

One of those heroes I have been fortunate enough to learn from and, I hope, help is China’s Wang Qishan, who has been a remarkable force for good for decades. To explain what he is like and the journey that took him to the top of China’s leadership would take more of this book than I can spare. In brief, Wang is a historian, a very high-level thinker, and a very practical man. I have rarely known a person to be both extremely wise and extremely practical. A leading shaper of the Chinese economy for decades who is also responsible for eliminating corruption, he is known to be a no-nonsense man who can be trusted to get stuff done.

It is too soon to say when or how this era will end or what will succeed it. But what is clear is that a good many of the trends are worrisome. If, for example, a Sino-American cold war materializes, it is quite possible this era may come to be known as the inter–Cold War era, one bookended by the U.S.-Soviet Cold War and one between the United States and China. Such an outcome would result in lower rates of economic growth for both because trade and investment would inevitably be curtailed. It would also reduce the potential for cooperation on regional and global issues. If the liberal world order is sustained and strengthened with the United States resuming a leading role, this could continue to be an era largely characterized by stability, prosperity, and freedom. It is possible, though, that the United States will choose to largely abandon its leading role in the world. In this case, we could in principle see an era of Chinese primacy, but given China’s character, internal constraints, and the nature and scale of the domestic challenges it faces, this is improbable. More likely is that this will turn out to be an era of deterioration, one in which no country or group of countries exercises effective global leadership. In that case, the future would be one of accelerating global disorder.

The Soviet collapse in 1989 was even more peaceful, despite the eruption of ethnic conflict in the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Never before has such a mighty empire disappeared so swiftly and so quietly. The Soviet Empire of 1989 had suffered no military defeat except in Afghanistan, no external invasions, no rebellions, nor even large-scale Martin Luther King-style campaigns of civil disobedience. The Soviets still had millions of soldiers, tens of thousands of tanks and aeroplanes, and enough nuclear weapons to wipe out the whole of humankind several times over. The Red Army and the other Warsaw Pact armies remained loyal. Had the last Soviet ruler, Mikhail Gorbachev, given the order, the Red Army would have opened fire on the subjugated masses. Yet the Soviet elite, and the Communist regimes through most of eastern Europe (Romania and Serbia were the exceptions), chose not to use even a tiny fraction of this military power. When its members realised that Communism was bankrupt, they renounced force, admitted their failure, packed their suitcases and went home. Gorbachev and his colleagues gave up without a struggle not only the Soviet conquests of World War Two, but also the much older tsarist conquests in the Baltic, the Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia. It is chilling to contemplate what might have happened if Gorbachev had behaved like the Serbian leadership – or like the French in Algeria.

Throughout the history of the church, Christians have tended to elevate the importance of one over the other. For the first 1,500 years of the church, singleness was considered the preferred state and the best way to serve Christ. Singles sat at the front of the church. Marrieds were sent to the back.4 Things changed after the Reformation in 1517, when single people were sent to the back and marrieds moved to the front — at least among Protestants.5 Scripture, however, refers to both statuses as weighty, meaningful vocations. We’ll spend more time on each later in the chapter, but here is a brief overview. Marrieds. This refers to a man and woman who form a one-flesh union through a covenantal vow — to God, to one another, and to the larger community — to permanently, freely, faithfully, and fruitfully love one another. Adam and Eve provide the clearest biblical model for this. As a one-flesh couple, they were called by God to take initiative to “be fruitful . . . fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). Singles. Scripture teaches that human beings are created for intimacy and connection with God, themselves, and one another. Marriage is one framework in which we work this out; singleness is another. While singleness may be voluntarily chosen or involuntarily imposed, temporary or long-term, a sudden event or a gradual unfolding, Christian singleness can be understood within two distinct callings: • Vowed celibates. These are individuals who make lifelong vows to remain single and maintain lifelong sexual abstinence as a means of living out their commitment to Christ. They do this freely in response to a God-given gift of grace (Matthew 19:12). Today, we are perhaps most familiar with vowed celibates as nuns and priests in the Roman Catholic or Orthodox Church. These celibates vow to forgo earthly marriage in order to participate more fully in the heavenly reality that is eternal union with Christ.6 • Dedicated celibates. These are singles who have not necessarily made a lifelong vow to remain single, but who choose to remain sexually abstinent for as long as they are single. Their commitment to celibacy is an expression of their commitment to Christ. Many desire to marry or are open to the possibility. They may have not yet met the right person or are postponing marriage to pursue a career or additional education. They may be single because of divorce or the death of a spouse. The apostle Paul acknowledges such dedicated celibates in his first letter to the church at Corinth (1 Corinthians 7). Understanding singleness and marriage as callings or vocations must inform our self-understanding and the outworking of our leadership. Our whole life as a leader is to bear witness to God’s love for the world. But we do so in different ways as marrieds or singles. Married couples bear witness to the depth of Christ’s love. Their vows focus and limit them to loving one person exclusively, permanently, and intimately. Singles — vowed or dedicated — bear witness to the breadth of Christ’s love. Because they are not limited by a vow to one person, they have more freedom and time to express the love of Christ to a broad range of people. Both marrieds and singles point to and reveal Christ’s love, but in different ways. Both need to learn from one another about these different aspects of Christ’s love. This may be a radically new concept for you, but stay with me. God intends this rich theological vision to inform our leadership in ways few of us may have considered. Before exploring the connections between leadership and marriage or singleness, it’s important to understand the way marriage and singleness are commonly understood in standard practice among leaders today.

Adventists urged to study women’s ordination for themselves Adventist Church President Ted N. C. Wilson appealed to members to study the Bible regarding the theology of ordination as the Church continues to examine the matter at Annual Council next month and at General Conference Session next year. Above, Wilson delivers the Sabbath sermon at Annual Council last year. [ANN file photo] President Wilson and TOSC chair Stele also ask for prayers for Holy Spirit to guide proceedings September 24, 2014 | Silver Spring, Maryland, United States | Andrew McChesney/Adventist Review Ted N. C. Wilson, president of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, appealed to church members worldwide to earnestly read what the Bible says about women’s ordination and to pray that he and other church leaders humbly follow the Holy Spirit’s guidance on the matter. Church members wishing to understand what the Bible teaches on women’s ordination have no reason to worry about where to start, said Artur A. Stele, who oversaw an unprecedented, two-year study on women’s ordination as chair of the church-commissioned Theology of Ordination Study Committee. Stele, who echoed Wilson’s call for church members to read the Bible and pray on the issue, recommended reading the study’s three brief “Way Forward Statements,” which cite Bible texts and Adventist Church co-founder Ellen G. White to support each of the three positions on women’s ordination that emerged during the committee’s research. The results of the study will be discussed in October at the Annual Council, a major business meeting of church leaders. The Annual Council will then decide whether to ask the nearly 2,600 delegates of the world church to make a final call on women’s ordination in a vote at the General Conference Session next July. Wilson, speaking in an interview, urged each of the church’s 18 million members to prayerfully read the study materials, available on the website of the church’s Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research. "Look to see how the papers and presentations were based on an understanding of a clear reading of Scripture,” Wilson said in his office at General Conference headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland. “The Spirit of Prophecy tells us that we are to take the Bible just as it reads,” he said. “And I would encourage each church member, and certainly each representative at the Annual Council and those who will be delegates to the General Conference Session, to prayerfully review those presentations and then ask the Holy Spirit to help them know God’s will.” The Spirit of Prophecy refers to the writings of White, who among her statements on how to read the Bible wrote in The Great Controversy (p. 598), “The language of the Bible should be explained according to its obvious meaning, unless a symbol or figure is employed.” “We don’t have the luxury of having the Urim and the Thummim,” Wilson said, in a nod to the stones that the Israelite high priest used in Old Testament times to learn God’s will. “Nor do we have a living prophet with us. So we must rely upon the Holy Spirit’s leading in our own Bible study as we review the plain teachings of Scripture.” He said world church leadership was committed to “a very open, fair, and careful process” on the issue of women’s ordination. Wilson added that the crucial question facing the church wasn’t whether women should be ordained but whether church members who disagreed with the final decision on ordination, whatever it might be, would be willing to set aside their differences to focus on the church’s 151-year mission: proclaiming Revelation 14 and the three angels’ messages that Jesus is coming soon. 3 Views on Women’s Ordination In an effort to better understand the Bible’s teaching on ordination, the church established the Theology of Ordination Study Committee, a group of 106 members commonly referred to by church leaders as TOSC. It was not organized

If your feeding on the Word of God is only happening when the pastor preaches, then you will suffer from malnourishment. When people become so focused on teaching lessons rather than teaching students, churches can become places where lessons are delivered, but no real change comes about. When members are taught how to budget and manage their money wisely they are more capable of supporting the church’s ministries. When individuals take on leadership roles, they need to be accountable, not only to God, but also to others at the church. The success or failure of your ministry depends on this. So many people would have a better opinion of Christians if they felt that the believers did not have a “holier than thou” attitude. Attract unbelievers; be honest and open. If you have experienced tough problems, and you know that God made a way for you, don’t keep this good news to yourself. Share your testimony; it just might change someone’s life. People like to know that others care about them. You may never know how much a kind word, a discussion, a visit, a brief note, a birthday card or some much needed friendship can influence someone who is not used to thoughtful gestures. It is hard to motivate people to act if they do not see the person leading them setting the proper example. Whenever only one person is responsible for making all of the major decisions for an organization, problems can arise; this is true of churches as well.

Tough times brought on by the Gulf War were testing such assumptions, forcing us to consider our response. We needed to come up with new ideas, do more with less, make short-term gains through greater efficiency, and prepare for long-term gains. That meant cutting every dollar possible in overhead and procedures while maintaining or boosting spending in three vital competitive areas. Number one was product quality. World leadership demanded that we maintain world-class quality, and recession is generally a period when material and labor prices are lowest and room occupancies are down. So we renovated and refurbished at such normally busy properties as the Inn on the Park in London and The Pierre in New York at a time when revenue would be little affected and customers least inconvenienced. That meant we were spending when others were retrenching. We had followed that strategy in 1981-82, and the rebound from that recession had given us nine years of steady growth. I thought the odds were in our favor to score the same way again. The second area was marketing. It’s tempting during recession to cut back on consumer advertising. At the start of each of the last three recessions, the growth of spending on such advertising had slowed by an average of 27 percent. But consumer studies of those recessions had showed that companies that didn’t cut their ads had, in the recovery, captured the most market share. So we didn’t cut our ad budget. In fact, we raised it modestly to gain brand recognition, which continued advertising sustains. As studies show, it’s much easier to sustain momentum than restart it. Third, we eased the workload and reduced costs by simplifying reporting methods. We set up a new system that allowed each hotel to recalculate its forecast, with minimal input, to year’s end, then send it in electronically along with a brief monthly commentary.

It was a telling point: Roosevelt met with Truman only twice during the eighty-two days of his fourth term, and their discussions were brief and perfunctory. Roosevelt apparently believed that his health problems would not cut short his life, or at least would not affect him before the war ended. Moreover, he didn’t seem to think that Truman needed to know about the atomic bomb or postwar plans. This may

Since the election, he’s figured out how to avoid such questions completely; White House press briefings and formal news conferences have been replaced with “chopper talk” during which he can pretend he can’t hear any unwelcome questions over the noise of the helicopter blades. In 2020, his pandemic “press briefings” quickly devolved into mini–campaign rallies filled with self-congratulation, demagoguery, and ring kissing. In them he has denied the unconscionable failures that have already killed thousands, lied about the progress that’s being made, and scapegoated the very people who are risking their lives to save us despite being denied adequate protection and equipment by his administration. Even as hundreds of thousands of Americans are sick and dying, he spins it as a victory, as proof of his stunning leadership.

So, what qualities must you have to be a good delegator? There are five main tips: 1 Choose the right staff. 2 Train them. 3 Take care in briefing them, and ensuring their understanding of the `why' and `how to' oftasks delegated to them (and in imparting to them an understanding ofbusiness aims and policies). 4 Try not to interfere - stand back and support. 5 Control in a sensible and sensitive manner by checking progress at agreed intervals.

At 6 P.M. Paulson and Bernanke briefed members of the House and Senate leadership. They had little choice, Bernanke explained. AIG was one of the ten most popular stocks in Americans’ 401(k) accounts. The Fed would have to loan AIG $85 billion.

Consider, though, how the insight sessions, industry updates, and briefings for the CEO and CFO before the analyst calls will help meet the customer's business needs and will also link to the objective of building relationships with the CEO and CFO over the next six months; likewise, the coaching sessions and prep before the board meetings will cement the partner's relationship with the CFO even further. Meeting with the CEO and CFO before analyst calls to brief them on issues that they might need to discuss will give the partner the opportunity to provide essential information when they need it the most, creating a dependency on the partner and cementing his relationship as a trusted adviser to the company's leadership team. People are often focused on trying to get their customers to like them. I always advise my clients that it is nice if your customers like you, but essential that they need you. You want to include negotiable issues that position you to create this type of dependency.

In the NGO universe, which has evolved a strange anodyne language of its own, everything has become a “subject”, a separate, professionalised, special-interest issue. Community development, leadership development, human rights, health, education, reproductive rights, AIDS, orphans with AIDS—have all been hermetically sealed into their own silos with their own elaborate and precise funding brief. Funding has fragmented solidarity in ways that repression never could.

Take whatever job you can at one of those companies. Don’t worry too much about the title—focus on the work. If you get a foot in the door at a growing company, you’ll find opportunities to grow, too. Just whatever you do, don’t become a “management consultant” at a behemoth like McKinsey or Bain or one of the other eight consultancies that dominate the industry. They all have thousands upon thousands of employees and work almost exclusively with Fortune 5000 companies. These corporations, typically led by tentative, risk-averse CEOs, call in the management consultants to do a massive audit, find the flaws, and present leadership with a new plan that will magically “fix” everything. What a fairy tale—don’t get me started. But to many new grads, it sounds perfect: you get paid incredibly well to travel around the world, work with powerful companies and executives, and learn exactly how to make a business successful. It’s an alluring promise. Parts of it are even true. Yes, you get a nice paycheck. And yes, you get plenty of practice pitching important clients. But you don’t learn how to build or run a company. Not really. Steve Jobs once said of management consulting, “You do get a broad cut at companies but it’s very thin. It’s like a picture of a banana: you might get a very accurate picture but it’s only two dimensions, and without the experience of actually doing it you never get three dimensional. So you might have a lot of pictures on your walls, you can show it off to your friends—I’ve worked in bananas, I’ve worked in peaches, I’ve worked in grapes—but you never really taste it.” If you do choose to go that route and find yourself at one of the Big Four or the other top six firms, then that is of course your choice. Just know before you go what you want to learn and the experiences you need for your next chapter. Don’t get stuck. Management consulting should never be your endpoint—it should be a way station, a brief pause on your journey to actually doing something. Making something. To do great things, to really learn, you can’t shout suggestions from the rooftop then move on while someone else does the work. You have to get your hands dirty. You have to care about every step, lovingly craft every detail. You have to be there when it falls apart so you can put it back together. You have to actually do the job. You have to love the job.

if there really is no way you can win, you never say it out loud. You assess why, change strategy, adjust tactics, and keep fighting and pushing till either you’ve gotten a better outcome or you’ve died. Either way, you never quit when your country needs you to succeed. As Team 5 was shutting down the workup and loading up its gear, our task unit’s leadership flew to Ramadi to do what we call a predeployment site survey. Lieutenant Commander Thomas went, and so did both of our platoon officers in charge. It was quite an adventure. They were shot at every day. They were hit by IEDs. When they came home, Lieutenant Commander Thomas got us together in the briefing room and laid out the details. The general reaction from the team was, “Get ready, kids. This is gonna be one hell of a ride.” I remember sitting around the team room talking about it. Morgan had a big smile on his face. Elliott Miller, too, all 240 pounds of him, looked happy. Even Mr. Fantastic seemed at peace and relaxed, in that sober, senior chief way. We turned over in our minds the hard realities of the city. Only a couple weeks from now we would be calling Ramadi home. For six or seven months we’d be living in a hornet’s nest, picking up where Team 3 had left off. It was time for us to roll. In late September, Al Qaeda’s barbaric way of dealing with the local population was stirring some of Iraq’s Sunni tribal leaders to come over to our side. (Stuff like punishing cigarette smokers by cutting off their fingers—can you blame locals for wanting those crazies gone?) Standing up for their own people posed a serious risk, but it was easier to justify when you had five thousand American military personnel backing you up. That’ll boost your courage, for sure. We were putting that vise grip on that city, infiltrating it, and setting up shop, block by block, house by house, inch by inch. On September 29, a Team 3 platoon set out on foot from a combat outpost named Eagle’s Nest on the final operation of their six-month deployment. Located in the dangerous Ma’laab district, it wasn’t much more than a perimeter of concrete walls and concertina wire bundling up a block of residential homes. COP Eagle’s

Don’t let a brief moment of happiness leave you with a lifetime of regret.

It is chilling to contemplate what might have happened if Gorbachev had behaved like the Serbian leadership – or like the French in Algeria.

Before Entry Read internal and external perspectives on the market and consumers. You won’t become an expert, but that’s OK; awareness is what you’re after. Identify local consultants who can brief you on the state of the market and the competitive environment. Learn the language—it’s not about fluency; it’s about respect. Develop some hypotheses about the business situation you are entering. – Use the STARS model to talk with your new boss and other stakeholders about the situation. – Assess the leadership team—is it functioning well, and does it comprise a good mix of new and veteran, or local and expatriate, talent? – Assess the overall organization using any available corporate performance and talent-pool data. – If possible, talk to some team members to gather their insights and test some of your early hypotheses. After Entry Your first day, first week, and first month are absolutely critical. Without the following four-phase plan, you risk getting drawn into fighting fires rather than proactively leading change. Diagnose the situation and align the leadership team around some early priorities. Establish strategic direction and align the organization around it. Repair critical processes and strive for execution consistency. Develop local leadership talent to lay the foundation for your eventual exit.

This brief family history obviously does not demonstrate frank insanity, such as psychosis, mania, or severe depression. But it does suggest that FDR’s relatives had personalities abnormal enough to arouse the attention of average people.

When the people of a congregation zealously hold convictions about time and space, the church will begin to change (and change fast)! There is a powerful grace that comes with the belief that this mortal life is terrifyingly brief and the life after death is gloriously infinite. This profound conviction moves the church to become a people of radical action, urgency, unction, and even risk.

The Egyptian’s asset,” Ron Carter began, tapping a brief command into his laptop to bring an image up on the screen at the front of the room, “is this man. Amr Shafik. He was a member of Egypt's Freedom and Justice Party from 2012 to 2013, and was imprisoned when the military overthrew Morsi and cracked down on Muslim Brotherhood activities in the country. In prison, he made contact with extremist elements, and was drawn into the orbit of the Islamic State. It's not completely clear even at this juncture whether he did so of his own accord or at the order of the Mukhabarat.” Egypt's intelligence service, Kranemeyer thought, looking over at Bell to see the DNI listening intently. As feared and brutal today as it had ever been in the days of Mubarak. A brutal necessity, perhaps. Or at least that’s what they told themselves. He wondered sometimes, about cause and effect. “What we do know is that he was re-arrested for such affiliations soon after release and it was then, if not before, that Egyptian intelligence brought him on side. And that, according to what they’ve shared with us, is where he’s been ever since. Providing intelligence on the Islamic State’s leadership in the Sinai, particularly Umar ibn Hassan. As he’s done now, in giving us Hassan’s location for noonday tomorrow, local time.

While the current state briefing is often sobering, it's a helpful psychological space from which to accept the need for change and generate innovative future state thinking

Filling your team up while filling them in on what's going on

This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no “brief candle” to me; it is sort of a splendid torch which I’ve got to hold up for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

In 1909 Fritz Haber, a professor of chemistry at the University of Karlsruhe, succeeded in synthesizing ammonia from its elements (fig. 4.4). He did that by taking nitrogen from the air and hydrogen from reacting glowing coke with water vapor and combining the two elements under high pressure in the presence of a metal (iron) catalyst. His research was supported by BASF, at that time the world’s leader in the production of industrial chemicals, and it was under the leadership of Carl Bosch, one of BASF’s most capable engineers, that Haber’s bench-top demonstration was converted rapidly into a full-scale industrial synthesis (fig. 4.4).

Organizations that create a climate such as that described in this chapter will naturally experience an acceleration of their OODA loops. So the question becomes how to install it. Boyd suggested, in his briefing “Organic Design for Command and Control,” that it will grow naturally if the senior management sets the proper conditions. He defines the two essential elements necessary for running any human organization along maneuver conflict—rapid OODA loop—lines as: •   Leadership—implies the art of inspiring people to enthusiastically take action towards uncommon goals. It must interact with the system to shape the character or nature of that system in order to realize what is to be done. •   Appreciation—refers to the recognition of worth or value, clear perception, understanding, comprehension, discernment, etc. It must not interact nor interfere with the system, but must discern (not shape) the character / nature of what is being done or about to be done.

In Walked Jim September 2013: Entering his first morning staff meeting as FBI director, Jim Comey loped to the head of the table, put down his briefing books, and lowered his six-foot-eight-inch, shirtsleeved self into a huge leather chair. He leaned the chair so far back on its hind legs that he lay practically flat, testing gravity. Then he sat up, stretched like a big cat, pushed the briefing books to the side, and said, as if he were talking to a friend, I don’t want to talk about these today. I’d rather talk about some other things first. He talked about how effective leaders immediately make their expectations clear and proceeded to do just that for us. Said he would expect us to love our jobs, expect us to take care of ourselves … I remember less of what he said than the easygoing way he spoke and the absolute clarity of his day-one priority: building relationships with each member of his senior team. Comey continually reminded the FBI leadership that strong relationships with one another were critical to the institution’s functioning. One day, after we reviewed the briefing books, he said, Okay, now I want to go around the room, and I want you all to say one thing about yourselves that no one else here knows about you. One hard-ass from the criminal division stunned the room to silence when he said, My wife and I, we really love Disney characters, and all our vacation time we spend in the Magic Kingdom. Another guy, formerly a member of the hostage-rescue team, who carefully tended his persona as a dead-eyed meathead—I thought his aesthetic tastes ran the gamut from YouTube videos of snipers in Afghanistan to YouTube videos of Bigfoot sightings—turned out to be an art lover. I really like the old masters, he said, but my favorite is abstract expressionism. This hokey parlor game had the effect Comey intended. It gave people an opportunity to be interesting and funny with colleagues in a way that most had rarely been before. Years later, I remember it like yesterday. That was Jim’s effect on almost everyone he worked with. I observed how he treated people. Tell me your story, he would say, then listen as if there were only the two of you in the whole world. You were, of course, being carefully assessed at the same time that you were being appreciated and accepted. He once told me that people’s responses to that opening helped him gauge their ability to communicate. Over the next few years I would sit in on hundreds of meetings with him. All kinds of individuals and organizations would come to Comey with their issues. No matter how hostile they were when they walked in the door, they would always walk out on a cloud of Comey goodness. Sometimes, after the door had closed, he would look at me and say, That was a mess. Jim has the same judgmental impulse that everyone has. He is complicated, with many different sides, and he is so good at showing his best side—which is better than most people’s—that his bad side, which is not as bad as most people’s, can seem more shocking on the rare moments when it flashes to the surface.

The recommendations were presented as twelve overarching ideas called “Imperatives.” In brief, they included strengthening the faculty both in excellence and in size, enhancing both the graduate and the undergraduate academic experiences, emphasizing the liberal arts, increasing ethnic and geographic diversity, expanding and enhancing the physical plant and landscape, developing more “enlightened” governance, attracting more financial resources, and building closer ties with the local community and the state of Texas.

Your leadership team doesn't know what to do with your assessment and guidance and subconsciously starts questioning your leadership ability. “What is your recommendation or plan of attack?” they wonder. When someone who is braver and clearer steps up, you're history.

Instead, in a move that would become familiar to me, Sessions cast his eyes down at the table, and they darted quickly back and forth, side to side. To my memory, he said nothing. After a brief moment of eye darting, he put both hands on the table and stood, thanking me for coming. I read in his posture and face a message that he would not be able to help me. Rybicki and I left. I was so thrown by the silent eye darting that I had Rybicki follow up with a call to Sessions’s chief of staff to make sure he understood my concern and the importance of the attorney general’s shielding me from the president. His chief of staff said they got it.

You think it was a great answer, right?” and started to move on. I jumped on it and did something I might never have done as a younger person—especially to a president of the United States. Something I’d never seen anyone else do around Trump in the limited number of interactions I’d had with him. I can’t remember if it was midsentence or in a brief pause before he launched into the next set of assertions to which we were all supposed to agree, but I interrupted his monologue. “The first part of your answer was fine, Mr. President,” I said, as he took a breath and looked at me with a blank expression. “But not the second part. We aren’t the kind of killers that Putin is.