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Real men don't dance to other people's tune, instead, they play for others to dance.
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Michael Bassey Johnson
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Life throws challenges but with patience and resilience you can convert every challenge into a new opportunity to grow.
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Amit Ray (Power of Exponential Mindset for Success and Leadership)
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A wise man is someone who knows how to convert obstacles into resources.
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Abhysheq Shukla (KISS Life "Life is what you make it")
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The energy now spent on self-protection can be converted into positive energy if we're willing to encounter reality and see it clearly. Facing reality is an empowering act - it can liberate our mind and heart to discern how best to use our power and influence in service for this time.
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Margaret J. Wheatley (Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity)
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Goals convert vision into energy. When you lay out exactly what you want to do in detail, you immediately start feeling the room move and the earth shake. You are pulled into your new life like some scene from a movie. Goals help make great men. J. C. Penney once said, “Give me a stock clerk with a goal, and I will give you a man who will make history. Give me a man without a goal and I will give you a stock clerk.
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Dave Ramsey (EntreLeadership: 20 Years of Practical Business Wisdom from the Trenches)
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Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results. By themselves, they only set limits to what can be attained.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done (Harperbusiness Essentials))
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Someone can inspire you to create dreams, but only you can ignite your own imagination and instill an attitude of learning to convert these dreams into reality.
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Sukant Ratnakar (Quantraz)
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In the shock of the moment, I gave some thought to renting a convertible and driving the twenty-seven hundred miles back alone. But then I realized I was neither single nor crazy.
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James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
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This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.
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George Washington (The Complete Book of Presidential Inaugural Speeches: from George Washington to Barack Obama (Annotated))
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We know he [Timothy] never converted to Judaism, since in Acts we learn that young Timothy needed to be circumcised. So I have no idea what led Timothy to follow Paul int the great unknown, other than his deep faith in Jesus and the movement of the Holy Spirit. Paul's faith and leadership must have been contagious for a young man who had all the freedoms of the Greco-Roman culture to trade it in for a painful procedure and life of risk with Paul.
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Rachel Billups
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The Islamic revolution in Iran is a positive development.
At the same time, the Islamic revolution of Afghanistan, sprung exclusively from
spiritual roots, dealt a heavy blow to the communist regime in the former Soviet Union. In face of that revolution, the red Soviet empire had to concede that it is incapable, in spite of its military superiority, to defeat the Mujaheddin, whose main weapons were their right and their spiritual strength.
Another quite new situation appeared as a consequence of the Islamic revolution in Iran, that destroyed the Zionist rule in that country and shook its foundations in that part of the world. Khomeini's letter to Gorbachev, in which he was inviting the latter to convert to Islam, had great symbolic power! What is new again is the movement of Islamic rebirth and the continuous decay of the strength of the colonial government bodies directed from afar by Israel in many Islamic countries."
"The Islamic system has remained stable in Iran even after the death of Khomeini and the change in the person of the leader and of the leadership group the only one to remain stable in the entire Islamic world.
On the contrary, the demise of the Shah meant at the same time the collapse of his
regime, his artificial form of government, and his army. All that went to the dust-bin of
history. The same fate awaits the other regimes that prevail in the muslim world. Israel knows that very well. She tries desperately to cause the wheel of history to stand still. However, any strike against Iran or against the growing Islamic movements, will cause the anger of the muslim masses to grow, and the fire of the Islamic revolution to ignite. Nobody will be able to suppress that revolution.
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Otto Ernst Remer
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Belleville would have us believe that homeowners could bypass all the qualifications for elders in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, and, simply by virtue of having a church meet in their home, become overseers or elders. She would also have us believe that Lydia, who was a brand-new convert and who had just been baptized, became the overseer of the church at Philippi simply because she said to Paul, “come to my house and stay” (Acts 16:15). This claim is going far beyond the evidence in Scripture. The extra-biblical references that Belleville cites do not prove anything about homeowners having such a leadership role in the churches either.3 This claim is speculation with no facts to support it, and several factors in Scripture contradict it. But by making this unsubstantiated claim, Belleville leads readers to think that “Mary (Acts 12:12), Lydia (16:15), Chloe (1 Cor 1:11), and Nympha (Col 4:15)” were “overseers of house churches.”4 She leads readers to believe that several such women were overseers or elders. And so she makes these verses say something they do not say. This leads people to disbelieve or seek some way to explain away the passages that restrict the office of elder to men, and so it undermines the authority of Scripture. Therefore this claim takes another step on the path to liberalism.
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Wayne Grudem (Evangelical Feminism: A New Path to Liberalism?)
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You may not recognize the name Steven Schussler, CEO of Schussler Creative Inc., but you are probably familiar with his very popular theme restaurant Rainforest Café. Steve is one of the scrappiest people I know, with countless scrappy stories. He is open and honest about his wins and losses. This story about how he launched Rainforest Café is one of my favorites: Steve first envisioned a tropical-themed family restaurant back in the 1980s, but unfortunately, he couldn’t persuade anyone else to buy into the idea at the time. Not willing to give up easily, he decided to get scrappy and be “all in.” To sell his vision, he transformed his own split-level suburban home into a living, mist-enshrouded rain forest to convince potential investors that the concept was viable. Yes, you read that correctly—he converted his own house into a jungle dwelling complete with rock outcroppings, waterfalls, rivers, and layers of fog and mist that rose from the ground. The jungle included a life-size replica of an elephant near the front door, forty tropical birds in cages, and a live baby baboon named Charlie. Steve shared the following details: Every room, every closet, every hallway of my house was set up as a three-dimensional vignette: an attempt to present my idea of what a rain forest restaurant would look like in actual operation. . . . [I]t took me three years and almost $400,000 to get the house developed to the point where I felt comfortable showing it to potential investors. . . . [S]everal of my neighbors weren’t exactly thrilled to be living near a jungle habitat. . . . On one occasion, Steve received a visit from the Drug Enforcement Administration. They wanted to search the premises for drugs, presuming he may have had an illegal drug lab in his home because of his huge residential electric bill. I imagine they were astonished when they discovered the tropical rain forest filled with jungle creatures. Steve’s plan was beautiful, creative, fun, and scrappy, but the results weren’t coming as quickly as he would have liked. It took all of his resources, and he was running out of time and money to make something happen. (It’s important to note that your scrappy efforts may not generate results immediately.) I asked Steve if he ever thought about quitting, how tight was the money really, and if there was a time factor, and he said, “Yes to all three! Of course I thought about quitting. I was running out of money and time.” Ultimately, Steve’s plan succeeded. After many visits and more than two years later, gaming executive and venture capitalist Lyle Berman bought into the concept and raised the funds necessary to get the Rainforest Café up and running. The Rainforest Café chain became one of the most successful themed restaurants ever created, and continues that way under Landry’s Restaurants and Tilman Fertitta’s leadership. Today, Steve creates restaurant concepts in fantastic warehouses far from his residential neighborhood!
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Terri L. Sjodin (Scrappy: A Little Book About Choosing to Play Big)
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In the shock of the moment, I gave some thought to renting a convertible and driving the twenty-seven hundred miles back alone. But then I realized I was neither single nor crazy. The acting director decided that, given the FBI’s continuing responsibility for my safety, the best course was to take me back on the plane I came on, with a security detail and a flight crew who had to return to Washington anyway. We got in the vehicle to head for the airport. News helicopters tracked our journey from the L.A. FBI office to the airport. As we rolled slowly in L.A. traffic, I looked to my right. In the car next to us, a man was driving while watching an aerial news feed of us on his mobile device. He turned, smiled at me through his open window, and gave me a thumbs-up. I’m not sure how he was holding the wheel. As we always did, we pulled onto the airport tarmac with a police escort and stopped at the stairs of the FBI plane. My usual practice was to go thank the officers who had escorted us, but I was so numb and distracted that I almost forgot to do it. My special assistant, Josh Campbell, as he often did, saw what I couldn’t. He nudged me and told me to go thank the cops. I did, shaking each hand, and then bounded up the airplane stairs. I couldn’t look at the pilots or my security team for fear that I might get emotional. They were quiet. The helicopters then broadcast our plane’s taxi and takeoff. Those images were all over the news. President Trump, who apparently watches quite a bit of TV at the White House, saw those images of me thanking the cops and flying away. They infuriated him. Early the next morning, he called McCabe and told him he wanted an investigation into how I had been allowed to use the FBI plane to return from California. McCabe replied that he could look into how I had been allowed to fly back to Washington, but that he didn’t need to. He had authorized it, McCabe told the president. The plane had to come back, the security detail had to come back, and the FBI was obligated to return me safely. The president exploded. He ordered that I was not to be allowed back on FBI property again, ever. My former staff boxed up my belongings as if I had died and delivered them to my home. The order kept me from seeing and offering some measure of closure to the people of the FBI, with whom I had become very close. Trump had done a lot of yelling during the campaign about McCabe and his former candidate wife. He had been fixated on it ever since. Still in a fury at McCabe, Trump then asked him, “Your wife lost her election in Virginia, didn’t she?” “Yes, she did,” Andy replied. The president of the United States then said to the acting director of the FBI, “Ask her how it feels to be a loser” and hung up the phone.
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James Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
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when you want to convert someone to your view, you go over to where he is standing, take him by the hand (mentally speaking), and guide him. You don’t stand across the room and shout at him; you don’t call him a dummy; you don’t order him to come over to where you are. You start where he is, and work from that position. That’s the only way to get him to budge.
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John C. Maxwell (Be a People Person: Effective Leadership Through Effective Relationships)
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Once we know more about the planet, we can decide whether to extend the invitation to meet with the Withaloo leadership or not. We need to know more about them as well. We can’t bring them to the system if they have crazy religious ideals and want to kill every being that doesn’t convert to left-handed dominance, or if they make murderous sacrifices to a pile of rocks to make sure the planet rotates, or something.
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Kevin Steverson (Salvage System (The Salvage Title Trilogy #3))
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for leaders, as for anyone else, fear converts into anger quite easily.
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Raymond M. Kethledge (Lead Yourself First: Inspiring Leadership Through Solitude)
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Your role as a revolutionary is clear: to champion this transformation, to be the catalyst that converts potential into excellence. This this transformative approach isn't just a shift in strategy; it's a redefinition of what it means to lead, to manage, and to succeed.
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Donna Karlin (Talent Momentum: Attracting Brilliance for Tomorrow's Leaders)
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But in 1497, pressure from the Roman Church and Spain led the Portuguese crown to abandon this tolerance. Some seventy thousand Jews were forced into a bogus but nevertheless sacramentally valid baptism. In 1506, Lisbon saw its first pogrom, which left two thousand “converted” Jews dead. (Spain had been doing as much for two hundred years.) From then on, the intellectual and scientific life of Portugal descended into an abyss of bigotry, fanaticism, and purity of blood.* The descent was gradual. The Portuguese Inquisition was installed only in the 1540s and burned its first heretic in 1543; but it did not become grimly unrelenting until the 1580s, after the union of the Portuguese and Spanish crowns in the person of Philip II. In the meantime, the crypto-Jews, including Abraham Zacut and other astronomers, found life in Portugal dangerous enough to leave in droves. They took with them money, commercial know-how, connections, knowledge, and—even more serious—those immeasurable qualities of curiosity and dissent that are the leaven of thought. That was a loss, but in matters of intolerance, the persecutor’s greatest loss is self-inflicted. It is this process of self-diminution that gives persecution its durability, that makes it, not the event of the moment, or of the reign, but of lifetimes and centuries. By 1513, Portugal wanted for astronomers; by the 1520s, scientific leadership had gone. The country tried to create a new Christian astronomical and mathematical tradition but failed, not least because good astronomers found themselves suspected of Judaism.12 (Compare the suspicious response to doctors in Inquisition Spain.)
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David S. Landes (Wealth And Poverty Of Nations)
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The virtue of objectivity and practicality increases your ability to produce great results with certainty and converts your efficiency to effectiveness.
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Master Del Pe (8 Types of Leaders: Every Leader Should Know)
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Need to unify a fragmented empire? Convert the masses! Want to justify a crusade? Call it holy! Need to legitimise a king? Crown him in the name of God!
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Rove Monteux
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From the Bible: “As a man thinketh, so is he.” • William James: “Belief creates the actual fact.” • Buddha: “All that we are is the result of all that we have thought.” • Emerson: “There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into power.” • Henry Ford: “Whether you think you can or can’t, you’re right.
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Peter G. Tormey (The Thursday Speeches: Lessons in Life, Leadership, and Football from Coach Don James)
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But a company which wants economic results has to have leadership in something of real value to a customer or market. It may be in one narrow but important aspect of the product line, it may be in its service, it may be in its distribution, or it may be in its ability to convert ideas into salable products on the market speedily and at low cost.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Executive in Action: Managing for Results / Innovation and Entrepreneurship / The Effective Executive)
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There is nothing worse for a young convert than to be thrust into leadership without mentoring and ongoing coaching because the devil relishes these vulnerable souls.
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Gary Rohrmayer (Church Planting Landmines)
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Learn from your experiences and past mistakes, assimilate them and convert them to formulas to achieve sustenance first , and then work your way to success to be the leaders in the market.
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Henrietta Newton Martin
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Where I live, on the West Coast, most churches tend to be small and to have little influence in the culture. Stark and Finke explain, “A major reason for the lack of church membership in the West is high rates of mobility, which decrease the ability of all voluntary organizations, not just churches, to maintain membership. That is, people move so often that they lack the social ties needed to affiliate with churches.”25 To address this problem, one of the most effective church-planting networks in the United States began in Tacoma, Washington, by using a method of developing intensive community in neighborhoods. Soma Communities fosters deep and intense relationships by teaching church planters to get closely involved in their neighborhoods, opening their homes to neighbors, gathering friends together on a regular basis, and forming “missional communities” focused on discovering and meeting the needs of neighbors and the community. It is these relational bonds that make someone unfamiliar with Christianity want to try it out. Rick Richardson, who directs the evangelism and leadership program at Wheaton College Graduate School, argues that “belonging comes before believing.” He contrasts older methods of evangelism that focused on asking individuals to make a set of commitments. Today, asserts Richardson, presenting four spiritual laws and inviting people to make decisions for Christ is less effective. “Evangelism is about helping people belong so that they can come to believe. So our communities need to be places where people can connect before they have to commit.”26 The idea is held up by social science research showing that converts tend to sign on to a new faith only after their social ties become stronger to those in the new faith than to others outside it. “This often occurs before a convert knows much about what the group believes.
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Rob Moll (What Your Body Knows About God: How We Are Designed to Connect, Serve and Thrive)
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I learned that when you can turn a presentation into a conversation, you have won the battle of converting a client; and second, I learned that the real Carla was my best competitive weapon and my key personal advantage.
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Carla Harris (Expect to Win: Proven Strategies for Success from a Wall Street Vet)
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The three criteria of reptilian functioning that leaders of any family or institution can always rely on to judge madness (of others or their own) are interfering in the relationships of others; unceasingly trying to convert others to their own point of view; and being unable to relate to people who do not agree with them.
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Edwin H. Friedman (A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix)
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Indeed, this was the lowest point of his career since the failure of Zion’s camp, having lost half of his apostles and many others in leadership positions and, most of all, having lost everything in Missouri, especially the holy land of Zion. His dream of establishing a New Jerusalem, of converting the Indians, of amassing a great army of holy warriors, and of saving the United States was virtually dead.
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Dan Vogel (Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839)
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As we saw with the envelopes, the task might not change, but the meaning of the task can be highlighted. This is enough to convert a menial experience to a meaningful one. (260)
Be it related to behaviors, changes, outcomes, or goals, success is inevitable when Revisiting is unavoidable.
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Elaina Noell (Inspiring Accountability in the Workplace: Unlocking the Brain's Secrets to Employee Engagement, Accountability, and Results)
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As we saw with the envelopes, the task might not change, but the meaning of the task can be highlighted. This is enough to convert a menial experience to a meaningful one.
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Elaina Noell (Inspiring Accountability in the Workplace: Unlocking the Brain's Secrets to Employee Engagement, Accountability, and Results)
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Legendary moments are granted to those who accept the moment and convert it into a story of courage.
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Luis E. Cavazos, Emotional Beauty
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The major task of great leaders is to convert competition into alliances
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Lucas D. Shallua
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Consider, for a moment, the radical nature of the qualities that God says in 1 Timothy 3:2–7 make for a long-term, faithful ministry leader, the kind of leader every influential church or ministry needs: Above reproach Husband of one wife Sober-minded Self-controlled Respectable Hospitable Able to teach Not a drunkard Not violent Gentle Not quarrelsome Not a lover of money Managing his household well Not a recent convert Well thought of by outsiders
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Paul David Tripp (Lead: 12 Gospel Principles for Leadership in the Church)
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the threat today is not western religions, but psychology and consumerism. is the Dharma becoming another psychotherapy, another commodity to be bought and sold? will western Buddhism become all too compatible with our individualistic consumption patterns, with expensive retreats and initiations, catering to overstressed converts, eager to pursue their own enlightenment? let’s hope not, because Buddhism and the west need each other. despite its economic and technologic dynamism, western civilisation and its globalisation are in trouble, which means all of us are in trouble. the most obvious example is our inability to respond to accelerating climate change, as seriously as it requires. if humanity is to survive and thrive over the next few centuries, there is no need to go on at length here about the other social and ecological crisis that confront us now, which are increasingly difficult to ignore [many of those are considered in the following chapters]. it’s also becoming harder to overlook the fact that the political and economic systems we’re so proud of seem unable to address these problems. one must ask, is that because they themselves are the problem? part of the problem is leadership, or the lack of it, but we can’t simply blame our rulers. it’s not only the lack of a moral core of those who rise to the top, or the institutional defamations that massage their rise, economical and political elites, and there’s not much difference between them anymore. like the rest of us, they are in need of a new vision of possibility, what it means to be human, why we tend to get into trouble, and how we can get out go it, those who benefit the most from the present social arrangements may think of themselves as hardheaded realists, but as self-conscious human beings, we remain motivated by some such vision, weather we’re aware of it or not, as why we love war, points out. even secular modernity is based on a spiritual worldview, unfortunately a deficient one, from a Buddhist perspective.
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David R. Loy (Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution)
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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).
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Vaclav Smil (Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure)
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Converting the problem statement into opportunity is the magic of leaders like Modi Ji.
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Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Modified Leadership)
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After Jesus returns to heaven, the disciples assume a leadership role. This is natural because they know Jesus better than any of the newer converts and are in the best position to teach them (Acts 2:42).
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Peter DeHaan (Jesus’s Broken Church: Reimagining Our Sunday Traditions from a New Testament Perspective)
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In the organization of the future, effective leadership will be about directing and fine-tuning the innovation machine, a complex system that converts signals to ideas and then opportunities to realized innovation, in a fast, adaptive way.
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Georgios Krasadakis (The Innovation Mode: How to Transform Your Organization into an Innovation Powerhouse)
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Your biggest opportunity to inspire Multiplier leadership might be in learning to recognize your own Diminisher traits and convert these conditions into Multiplier moments.
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Liz Wiseman (Multipliers, Revised and Updated: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter)
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So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. And I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.
from 1933 inaugural Address.
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Franklin D. Roosevelt
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growing greater by the day, David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, and delegates from Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia arrived in London to meet with the British leadership. They had been summoned by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, in order to explain the empire’s new policy toward Palestine. Jewish immigration would end. The Jews would live under Arab rule in an independent state. Ben-Gurion erupted: “Jews cannot be prevented from immigrating into the country except by force of British bayonets, British police, and the British navy. And, of course, Palestine cannot be converted into an Arab state over Jewish opposition without the constant help of British bayonets!
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Eric Gartman (Return to Zion: The History of Modern Israel)
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These temperaments were described by the early-twentieth-century German psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer, the first modern researcher on abnormal personality, who also noted the link between insanity and genius. He recognized the benefit of a little mental abnormality, either in “the initial stages” of severe mental illness, or in “mild, borderline states of mental disease,” which is what I mean by abnormal personalities or temperaments. If we removed the insanity from these people, Kretschmer said, we would convert their genius into merely ordinary talent. Insanity is not a “regrettable . . . accident” but the “indispensable catalyst” of genius.
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S. Nassir Ghaemi (A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness)
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In this case, the Freuds had it right. No ideal standard of mental health works scientifically. Or, in the eloquent words of Leston Havens, “Standards of health on the basis of admirable traits ignore the way human situations can call up the need for the most bizarre qualities.” If this is true, then mental health can only be scientifically defined in its norm and normal standards, as defined above. Only Grinker’s homoclites—average but not ideal—are mentally healthy. Searching for cultural references to help illustrate his newly defined class of people, Grinker called to mind a fictional depiction of “muscular Christian” normality, from a Thornton Wilder novel: The hero, who is a missionary, religious, unrealistic, and not very intelligent, goes around the country doing good, converting people, and accepting no return. He says: “George Brush is my name
America’s my nation
Ludington’s my dwelling place
and Heaven’s my destination.
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S. Nassir Ghaemi (A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness)
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In education, emotions are involved but they're a part of a whole package including intellect. In charismatic leadership, sometimes only the emotions are involved, and I think there is a danger of people, either good or bad people, getting converts on the basis of not really understanding what it is they're going into.
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Myles Horton (We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change)