Crop Leadership Quotes

Just as every crop performs on its specific type of soil, and not all fishes can grow in every kind of water, so is leadership. You can’t lead where you can’t thrive; you can lead where you can survive!

North Korea may be the craziest country in the world. It’s certainly a good competitor for that title. But it does make sense to try to figure out what’s in the minds of people when they’re acting in crazy ways. Why would they behave the way they do? Just imagine ourselves in their situation. Imagine what it meant in the Korean War years of the early 1950s for your country to be totally leveled, everything destroyed by a huge superpower, which furthermore was gloating about what it was doing. Imagine the imprint that would leave behind. Bear in mind that the North Korean leadership is likely to have read the public military journals of this superpower at that time explaining that, since everything else in North Korea had been destroyed, the air force was sent to destroy North Korea’s dams, huge dams that controlled the water supply -- a war crime, by the way, for which people were hanged in Nuremberg. And these official journals were talking excitedly about how wonderful it was to see the water pouring down, digging out the valleys, and the Asians scurrying around trying to survive. The journals were exulting in what this meant to those “Asians,” horrors beyond our imagination. It meant the destruction of their rice crop, which in turn meant starvation and death. How magnificent! It’s not in our memory, but it’s in their memory.

The release of the book just tomorrow. Get ready for a good dose of adrenaline ;-) Meanwhile, I have for you next article. Let’s talk about terroritstic activity in Afghanistan. The problem with which we are dealing today almost everywhere. And turning back to the Wild Heads of War, in the book you will find a lot of military action in Afghanistan, led by NATO soldiers. One of them was my friend, who in 2009 was killed by IED (Improvised Explosive Device). The book tells the stories based on fiction but for all fans of the genre it will be surely good story. Article below made just to bring you closer to terroritstic activity in Afghanistan, that is, what is worth knowing by reading Wild Heads of War. Stabilization mission in Afghanistan belongs to one of the most dangerous. The problem is in the unremitting terroristic activity. The basis is war, which started in 1979 after USSR invasion. Soviets wanted to take control of Afghanistan by fighting with Mujahideen powered by US forces. Conflict was bloody since the beginning and killed many people. Consequence of all these happenings was activation of Taliban under the Osama Bin Laden’s leadership. The situation became exacerbated after the downfall of Hussein and USA/coalition forces intervention. NATO army quickly took control and started realizing stabilization mission. Afghans consider soldiers to be aggressors and occupants. Taliban, radical Muslims, treat battle ideologically. Due to inconsistent forces, the battle is defined to be irregular. Taliban’s answer to strong, well-equiped Coalition Army is partisan war and terroristic attacks. Taliban do not dispose specialistic military equipment. They are mostly equipped with AK-47. However, they specialized in creating mines and IED (Improvised Explosive Device). They also captured huge part of weapons delivered to Afghan government by USA. Terroristic activity is also supported by poppy and opium crops, smuggling drugs. Problem in fighting with Afghan terrorists is also caused by harsh terrain and support of local population, which confesses islam. After refuting the Taliban in 2001, part of al Qaeda combatants found shelter on the borderland of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Afghan terrorists are also trained there.

If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

To use an analogy, the "leadership is the answer to everything" perspective is the modern equivalent of the, 'God is the answer to everything' perspective that held back our scientific understanding of the physical world in the Dark Ages. In the 1500's, people ascribed all events they didn't understand to God. Why did the crops fail? God did it. Why did we have an earthquake? God did it. What holds the planets in place? God. But with the Enlightenment, we began the search for a more scientific understanding - physics, chemistry, biology and so forth. Not that we become atheists, but we gained deeper understanding about how the universe ticks. Similarly, every time we attribute everything to 'Leadership," we're no different from the people in the 1500's. We're simply admitting our ignorance. Not that we should become leadership atheists (leadership does matter), but every time we throw our hands up in frustration - reverting back to "well, the answer must be Leadership!" - we prevent ourselves from gaining deeper, more scientific understanding about what makes great companies tick.

I love the story about the old farmer, ragged and barefooted, who sat on the steps of his tumbledown shack, chewing on a stem of grass. A passerby stopped and asked if he might have a drink of water. Wishing to be sociable, the stranger engaged the farmer in some conversation. “How is your cotton crop this year?” “Ain’t got none,” replied the farmer. “Didn’t you plant any cotton?” asked the passerby. “Nope,” said the farmer, “’fraid of boll weevils.” “Well,” asked the newcomer, “how’s your corn doing?” “Didn’t plant none,” replied the farmer, “’fraid there wasn’t going to be enough rain.” “Well,” asked the inquisitive stranger, “what did you plant?” “Nothing,” said the farmer, “I just played it safe.” A lot of well-intentioned people live by the philosophy of this farmer, and never risk upsetting the apple cart. They would prefer to “play it safe.” These people will never know the thrill of victory, because to win a victory one must risk a failure. C.

The third kind of soil was weed infested, resulting in a crop that once again looked good for a while but eventually was choked off by what Jesus called the deceitfulness of riches and the desire for other things.

Too many tools create point projects. These become islands of automation, disconnected from each other. Instead of creating a more connected enterprise, it has led to new silos. As a new generation of generative AI approaches are added to the stack, new silos may crop up.

crops. These “Midianites” or “Ishmaelites”, as they are called in the biblical record, would have made life impossible for the Israelites; but an Israelite man named Gideon, from the tribe of Manasseh, took leadership and led a small and mobile band against the invaders, took them by surprise, pursued them across the Jordan and killed many of them. The grateful tribesmen invited Gideon to become their king and to found a hereditary monarchy, but he refused.

One strategy we used to anticipate these was to have every manager write down all the surprises that tended to crop up in his or her line of work. By drawing from their own experiences, managers usually came up with quite a comprehensive list.

have a high percentage of fighter pilots, but there was no telling about the new crop of retreads. It was tough for them, with very little time in the airplane and the responsibilities of rank and leadership thrust upon them. The delicate balance between flying skill and tactical judgment was difficult to learn. Learning to subordinate your own fear was even more problematic. I knew now that everyone faced it in some degree. How you dealt with it determined whether you were a fighter pilot or simply someone flying fighters. The flow of retrainees from the short courses had begun to affect our losses. Filling the squadrons throughout Southeast Asia took a lot of manpower. We were getting the bodies, but we were no longer getting the skill levels. You couldn’t prove it, of course, but things were happening that didn’t bode well for the future.

the CTO is there to guide the board away from making decisive calls that are logical to people with a limited understanding of technology and the market conditions associated with it, but are clearly dangerous to somebody in the know. For example, buying a new proprietary HR and finance system on a five-year deal from a supplier that the department has already worked with for ten years might seem sensible to a non-technologist. The fact that the system is a complete pain to use (and ruinously expensive) may just about crop up on the leadership radar. What may not is the fact that systems like this are likely to become commoditised–which is to say, cheap and easily swapped with similar alternatives–in less than five years. Through a combination of ignorance and inertia, the department would be locking itself into the wrong deal, and constraining itself strategically as a result. A CTO stops this kind of mistake.