Informative Leadership Quotes

When I was born, humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I've been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. That's a gain of 130-fold of the literacy. When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans them-selves are literate, able to get the information, we're in an entirely new relationship to Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do.

We are no longer in the dispensation of age and experience. We are in the era of knowledge and information. Information leads a true leader and a true leader leads others.

Not making a decision is the worst thing you can do. So long as you feel you made the right decision based on the information you had at that time, there's no need to fret about it. If it fails, you'll know what to do next time.

In an era where businesses operate under the watchful eye of a globally connected and informed public, the ethical imperative has transcended mere compliance and become a critical determinant of long-term success.

The best way to drive performance in an organization is to create an environment in which information can flow freely, mistakes can be highlighted and help can be offered and received.

By the time your perfect information has been gathered, the world has moved on.

Do not expose yourself too much with the negative messages of the news media. Keep yourself informed but don't cultivate fear psychology.

Just as the bird needs wings to fly, a leader needs useful information to flow. Leaders learn.

One mark of a leader is his willingness to share information.

Effective board meetings go beyond mere discussion and information sharing. They should be forums for critical thinking, problem-solving, and strategic decision-making.

Great leaders don’t lead others with bitterness or resentfulness of past mistakes, they lead with hope and knowledge of the past to inform greater decision making in the future.

He turned the presidency – and the President's House – into something it had not been before: a center of curiosity and inquiry, of vibrant institution that played informal but important roles in the broader life of the nation, from science to literature.

Many questions come to mind. How influenced by contemporary religions were many of the scholars who wrote the texts available today? How many scholars have simply assumed that males have always played the dominant role in leadership and creative invention and projected this assumption into their analysis of ancient cultures? Why do so many people educated in this century think of classical Greece as the first major culture when written language was in use and great cities built at least twenty-five centuries before that time? And perhaps most important, why is it continually inferred that the age of the "pagan" religions, the time of the worship of female deities (if mentioned at all), was dark and chaotic, mysterious and evil, without the light of order and reason that supposedly accompanied the later male religions, when it has been archaeologically confirmed that the earliest law, government, medicine, agriculture, architecture, metallurgy, wheeled vehicles, ceramics, textiles and written language were initially developed in societies that worshiped the Goddess? We may find ourselves wondering about the reasons for the lack of easily available information on societies who, for thousands of years, worshiped the ancient Creatress of the Universe.

The Christian leader cannot simply be persons who have well informed opinions about the burning issues of our time.

If education were the same as information, the encyclopedias would be the greatest sages in the world.

A true leader leads for the sake of love and his knowledge of the path, a bad leader redirects his followers to the path of destruction.

Choose your counsel, company and companions wisely: beware seeking wise words of advice from a fool or expecting informed opinions or decisions from the ignorant.

In any pandemic, effective leadership is critical, and the first responsibility of the president or the head of any nation is to offer accurate and up-to-date information, provided by public health experts, not agenda-oriented political operatives.

The real problem occurs using the information in a negative base, and the real solution occurs using the information in a positive base.

Bridges take people across rivers. Leaders take people across ignorance. With a leader, the destination of a journey is sure.

Knowledge is strength. Ignorance is the kiss of death.

one of the most powerful and disconcerting forces in human nature—confirmation bias. Our brains have evolved to crave information consistent with what we already believe. We seek out and focus on facts and arguments that support our beliefs. More worrisome, when we are trapped in confirmation bias, we may not consciously perceive facts that challenge us, that are inconsistent with what we have already concluded. In a complicated, changing, and integrated world, our confirmation bias makes us very difficult people. We simply can’t change our minds.

Time is an unrenewable resource. You can’t get it back. All these things we’ve done to exchange information, to access information at our fingertips, have actually taken away our time for restoring the soul. You’re giving away your soul’s ability to be moved. If we’d spend more time in solitude, we’d value ourselves more.

Our schools will not improve if we continue to focus only on reading and mathematics while ignoring the other studies that are essential elements of a good education. Schools that expect nothing more of their students than mastery of basic skills will not produce graduates who are ready for college or the modern workplace. *** Our schools will not improve if we value only what tests measure. The tests we have now provide useful information about students' progress in reading and mathematics, but they cannot measure what matters most in education....What is tested may ultimately be less important that what is untested... *** Our schools will not improve if we continue to close neighborhood schools in the name of reform. Neighborhood schools are often the anchors of their communities, a steady presence that helps to cement the bond of community among neighbors. *** Our schools cannot improve if charter schools siphon away the most motivated students and their families in the poorest communities from the regular public schools. *** Our schools will not improve if we continue to drive away experienced principals and replace them with neophytes who have taken a leadership training course but have little or no experience as teachers. *** Our schools cannot be improved if we ignore the disadvantages associated with poverty that affect children's ability to learn. Children who have grown up in poverty need extra resources, including preschool and medical care.

Leaders don’t call unhappy followers “ungrateful people”. They see them as “lesson teachers”. They find out why they are unhappy; perhaps it could be as a result of their attitudes. That informs them to change!

Amid all the information available in our environment, which identity filter(s) do you use? Are you dedicated to popularity, to a role, to a cause, an ethic, a nation, an ethnicity? What identity gives meaning to your life?

We lead more out of who we are than out of what we do, strategic or otherwise. If we fail to recognize that who we are on the inside informs every aspect of our leadership, we will do damage to ourselves and to those we lead.

Listen with an open mind, gather all the incoming information, both verbal and non-verbal and be careful not to ignore things you don’t wish to hear. Don’t make assumptions or jump to conclusions. The punchline usually comes at the end!

In the time it took for the truth to get its boots on, false information had circled the earth many times.

We, newbies and young programmers, don't like chaos because it makes us dependent on experts. We have to beg for information and feel bad

Management informs. Leadership applies. The effective managers inform accurately. Effective leaders apply wisely.

Leaders inform, inspire and improve people. They educate, empower and enrich the value of their followers. They make impacts.

The new information technology, indifferent to human suffering, does not accommodate humane needs unless we harness it and make it do so.

What happens in you is more important than what happens to you.

Board of Directors members should each bring something unique to the table; and they should share their uniqueness with the rest of the board to inform key decisions.

Being able to shift in light of new information and in light of new opportunities is a skill. Practicing will make you a more confident leader of change, now and in the future.

Your vehicle of leadership is fueled by your willingness to learn. You can't lead if you can't learn!

I have never seen any indication that Powell discussed on his AOL account information that was classified at the time, but there were numerous examples of Secretary Clinton having done so.

Undoubtedly the public is becoming aware of the methods which are being used to mold its opinions and habits. If the public is better informed about the processes of its life, it will be so much the more receptive to reasonable appeals to its own interests. No matter how sophisticated, how cynical the public may become about publicity methods, it must respond to the basic appeals, because it will always need food, crave amusement, long for beauty, respond to leadership. If the public becomes more intelligent in its commercial demands, commercial firms will meet the new standards. If it becomes weary of the old methods used to persuade it to accept a given idea or commodity, its leaders will present their appeals more intelligently. Propaganda will never die out. Intelligent men must realize that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help to bring order out of chaos.

As a leader it is your job to protect the missional integrity of the Jesus gathering to which you have been called. It is your responsibility to see to it that the church under your care continues as a gathering of people in process; a place where the curious,the unconvinced, the sceptical, the used-to-believe and the broken, as well as the committed, informed and sold-out come together around Peter's declaration that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.

Our elders have failed us, they have not provided leadership, they have not provided counsel, they have been silent and compliant in the face of power. They have said nothing on fracking, climate collapse, the extinction crisis and done even less. The old have, for the most part, betrayed the young. This is as true of witchcraft as it is of our wider culture. It is therefore down to us as individuals to take our lead from the only source of initiation, living spirit, and through it embody the new witchcraft. We must become a witchcraft with a renewed sense of meaning and purpose, of responsibility to the land which is in crisis, or we are nothing more than consumers of the earth which will all too soon eat of us. Those who do not feel the imperative to act on this information demonstrate that they are not orientated, that is, they have no connection to the land and its denizens. Their magic is little more than a cerebral construct, and without being embodied is meaningless.

Practice: Please list the names of 5 people you could empower this month and how you could empower them with support, love, information, assistance, resources, knowledge, material objects or skills. Then, mark down in a Calendar or Time-Schedule by which day you will provide that Empowerment.

Leadership and obedience are the two legs on which a warrior's life is balanced. Without both, victory cannot be achieved. Leadership depends on information and comprehension. Not so obedience. Sometimes a commander may choose to share details of his plan. Often he may not. In either case, obedience must be instant and complete. Such automatic response relies on trust between commander and those commanded. And that trust can only be obtained through leadership.

The ugly truth about democracy is that it breeds anxiety. The responsibility for the government is shifted onto the body of the citizenry, who often lack the awareness and knowledge necessary to make informed decisions. They are tasked with electing their officials, they stress over it, they fall into despair when their side loses and act like their lives are over, and then when the government they elected inevitably does something they don’t want, they feel betrayed. There is no constancy in leadership, the policies vary wildly from one administration to the next, and one never knows where the nation shall be in ten years’ time. It is chaos.

In accordance with the prevailing conceptions in the U.S., there is no infringement on democracy if a few corporations control the information system: in fact, that is the essence of democracy. In the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the leading figure of the public relations industry, Edward Bernays, explains that “the very essence of the democratic process” is “the freedom to persuade and suggest,” what he calls “the engineering of consent.” “A leader,” he continues, “frequently cannot wait for the people to arrive at even general understanding … Democratic leaders must play their part in … engineering … consent to socially constructive goals and values,” applying “scientific principles and tried practices to the task of getting people to support ideas and programs”; and although it remains unsaid, it is evident enough that those who control resources will be in a position to judge what is “socially constructive,” to engineer consent through the media, and to implement policy through the mechanisms of the state. If the freedom to persuade happens to be concentrated in a few hands, we must recognize that such is the nature of a free society.

Despite the endless drumbeat in the conservative media, filled with exaggerated scandals and breathless revelations of little practical import, Hillary Clinton’s case, at least as far as we knew at the start, did not appear to come anywhere near General Petraeus’s in the volume and classification level of the material mishandled. Although she seemed to be using an unclassified system for some classified topics, everyone she emailed appeared to have both the appropriate clearance and a legitimate need to know the information.

Our investigation required us to answer two questions. The first question was whether classified documents were moved outside of classified systems or whether classified topics were discussed outside of a classified system. If so, the second question was what the subject of the investigation was thinking when she mishandled that classified information.

To succeed in this day and age, all you need to be ahead of the pack is to be informed, and turn the information into transformation for your betterment and that of others.

People will not change their minds but they will make new decisions based upon new information.

We need Wisdom to seek for the Kindom and we need the Kingdom to have the Freedom to posess all other things!

In Secretary Clinton’s case, the answer to the first question—was classified information mishandled?—was obviously “yes.

Software quality begins with the quality of the requirements.

Prepare, listen, question, and participate. IT plays a critical role in taking the organization to the next level of digital maturity.

Good leaders are humble enough to admit what they don’t know, and great leaders are constantly looking for new information.

Leave it to a newbie soldier to teach me a leadership lesson. Keep soldiers informed, and they’ll follow you anywhere.

Just because you don’t see the point, doesn’t mean there isn’t one.

Don't just become a monument of information, rather a solace of knowledge refuge.

African leaders must desire to liberates it’s people through intensive education (formal and informal). The African people deserve to be educated.

Leadership doesn't occur in a vacuum, it manifests in a context. These contexts are as dynamic as the personalities, stakes, culture and information available.

Values and ideals rooted deeply in the Love Paradigm will profoundly affect, inform and direct in the midst of any context.

Live an exemplary life as a leader. When you are gone, you will still lead from the grave because your influence, impacts and inspirations will become and information for the living.

Prudence alike, and the habits which he had acquired in travelling, as well as the character of a merchant which he still sustained, induced him to wave the morgue, or haughty superiority of a knight and noble towards an inferior personage, especially as he rightly conjectured that free intercourse with this man, whose acquirements seemed of a superior cast, was likely to render him a judge of his opinions and disposition towards him. In return for his condescension, he obtained a good deal of information concerning the province which he was approaching.

In the age-old debate about whether leadership traits are innate or developed, memory—the ease and capacity with which the mind stores information—is generally considered an inborn trait.

USE EMOTIONS AS INFORMATION. Horses use emotion as information to engage surprisingly agile responses to environmental stimuli and relationship challenges: (a) Feel the emotion in its purest form (b) Get the message behind the emotion (c) Change something in response to the message (d) Go back to grazing. In other words, let the emotion go, and either get back on task or relax, so you can enjoy life fully. Horses don’t hang on to the story, endlessly ruminating over the details of uncomfortable situations -- from an October 30, 2013 article on the Intelligent Optimist magazine

In the middle to late 1970s, when Putin joined the KGB, the secret police, like all Soviet institutions, was undergoing a phase of extreme bloating. Its growing number of directorates and departments were producing mountains of information that had no clear purpose, application, or meaning. An entire army of men and a few women spent their lives compiling newspaper clippings, transcripts of tapped telephone conversations, reports of people followed and trivia learned, and all of this made its way to the top of the KGB pyramid, and then to the leadership of the Communist Party, largely unprocessed and virtually unanalyzed.

If we don’t have all of the facts at hand, we still need to let the interested parties know that we’re on top of the research but that it will take time. When that information is gathered, inform them in an expedient manner. If employing the solution falls within our authority, implement it as soon as possible. If approval is required, document a request swiftly so any lag time won’t be attributed to our inattention.

Strive to do small things well. Be a doer and a self-starter—aggressiveness and initiative are two most admired qualities in a leader—but you must also put your feet up and think. Strive for self-improvement through constant self-evaluation. Never be satisfied. Ask of any project, How can it be done better? Don’t overinspect or oversupervise. Allow your leaders to make mistakes in training, so they can profit from the errors and not make them in combat. Keep the troops informed; telling them “what, how, and why” builds their confidence. The harder the training, the more troops will brag. Enthusiasm, fairness, and moral and physical courage—four of the most important aspects of leadership. Showmanship—a vital technique of leadership. The ability to speak and write well—two essential tools of leadership. There is a salient difference between profanity and obscenity; while a leader employs profanity (tempered with discretion), he never uses obscenities. Have consideration for others. Yelling detracts from your dignity; take men aside to counsel them. Understand and use judgment; know when to stop fighting for something you believe is right. Discuss and argue your point of view until a decision is made, and then support the decision wholeheartedly. Stay ahead of your boss.

An email cannot be ignored. You may wish an email was not sent to you, because you learned what you did not want to know, but it must be acted upon because there is now a permanent record linking you to that information.

Enhancing personal growth and greatness means keeping your mind soaked in stimulating educational resources. Read and study the Bible, personal-development books, and areas of information that you would like to specialize in.

Without action, forecasts and decisions about the future are not worth the paper they are written on. A decision that does not result in action is a poor one. The pace of business demands timely as well as informed decision making.

Keep in mind that when we limit our exposure to information, or when information itself is scarce, our picture of reality suffers. We become oblivious to both opportunities and hazards. Trends become invisible. History disappears. It's really just two sides of the same coin: the first commitment is as much a commitment to gathering information, from as many sources and in as much volume as can constructively be used, as it is a commitment to facing the facts.

Leadership and obedience are the two legs on which a warrior’s life is balanced. Without both, victory cannot be achieved. Leadership depends on information and comprehension. Not so obedience. Sometimes a commander may choose to share details of his plan. Often he may not. In either case, obedience must be instant and complete. Such automatic response relies on trust between commander and those commanded. And that trust can only be obtained through leadership.

Even with the misdemeanor, the Department of Justice has long required that investigators develop strong evidence to indicate government employees knew they were doing something improper in their handling of the classified information.

In contrast to those Hillary Clinton corresponded with, the author did not have the appropriate clearance or a legitimate need to know the information, which included notes of discussions with President Obama about very sensitive programs.

But here’s a critical point—more open decision making processes also typically require open information sharing. If you are going to involve more people in the process, they have to have the right information on which to base their decisions.

In what is known as the 70/20/10 learning concept, Robert Eichinger and Michael Lombardo, in collaboration with Morgan McCall of the Center for Creative Leadership, explain that 70 percent of learning and development takes place from real-life and on-the-job experiences, tasks, and problem solving; 20 percent of the time development comes from other people through informal or formal feedback, mentoring, or coaching; and 10 percent of learning and development comes from formal training.

Ambiverts typically . . . • Can process information both internally and externally. They need time to contemplate on their own, but consider the opinions and wisdom from people whom they trust when making a decision. • Love to engage and interact enthusiastically with others, however, they also enjoy calm and profound communication. • Seek to balance between their personal time and social time, they value each greatly. • Are able to move from one situation to the next with confidence, flexibility, and anticipation. “Not everyone is going to like us or understand us. And that is okay. It may have nothing to do with us personally; but rather more about who they are and how they relate to the world.

In the future, we should anticipate seeing more hybrid wars where conventional warfare, irregular warfare, asymmetric warfare, and information warfare all blend together, creating a very complex and challenging situation to the combatants; therefore it will require military forces to posses hybrid capabilities, which might help deal with hybrid threats.

In successful transformations, the president, division general manager, or department head plus another five, fifteen, or fifty people with a commitment to improved performance pull together as a team. This group rarely includes all of the most senior people because some of them just won’t buy in, at least at first. But in the most successful cases, the coalition is always powerful—in terms of formal titles, information and expertise, reputations and relationships, and the capacity for leadership. Individuals alone, no matter how competent or charismatic, never have all the assets needed to overcome tradition and inertia except in very small organizations. Weak committees are usually even less effective.

I made a lot of mistakes along the way and wish I had access to the information in this book back then. Common traps were stepped in—like trying a top-down mandate to adopt Agile, thinking it was one size fits all, not focusing on measurement (or the right things to measure), leadership behavior not changing, and treating the transformation like a program instead of creating a learning organization (never done).

In late July, the FBI learned that a Trump campaign foreign policy advisor named George Papadopoulos had been discussing, months earlier, obtaining from the Russian government emails damaging to Hillary Clinton. Based on this information, the FBI opened an investigation to try to understand whether Americans, including any associated with the Trump campaign, were working in any way with the Russians in their influence effort.

Commanders are not always leaders. Commanders are appointed. Leaders are unofficially “elected” by the troops in the unit. Likewise in other fields of endeavor. Every leader is put through an informal process in the first few weeks wherein his people judge him and decide whether or not he is worthy of their trust. He must earn that trust. How? A leader must prove himself by his actions, appearance, demeanor, attitude, and decisions.

On July 6, 2015, the Bureau received a referral from the inspector general of the intelligence community, a congressionally created independent office focused on finding risks and vulnerabilities across the nation’s vast intelligence community. The referral raised the issue of whether Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had mishandled classified information while using her personal email system. On July 10, the FBI opened a criminal investigation.

Consider the following: “Will Mindik be a good leader? She is intelligent and strong…” An answer quickly came to your mind, and it was yes. You picked the best answer based on the very limited information available, but you jumped the gun. What if the next two adjectives were corrupt and cruel? Take note of what you did not do as you briefly thought of Mindik as a leader. You did not start by asking, “What would I need to know before I formed an opinion about the quality of someone’s leadership?” System 1 got to work on its own from the first adjective: intelligent is good, intelligent and strong is very good. This is the best story that can be constructed from two adjectives, and System 1 delivered it with great cognitive ease. The story will be revised if new information comes in (such as Mindik is corrupt), but there is no waiting and no subjective discomfort. And there also remains a bias favoring the first impression.

Under the leadership of Henry Kissinger, first as Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and later as secretary of state, the United States sent an unequivocal signal to the most extreme rightist forces that democracy could be sacrificed in the cause of ideological warfare. Criminal operational tactics, including assassination, were not only acceptable but supported with weapons and money. A CIA internal memo laid it out in unsparing terms:        On September 16, 1970 [CIA] Director [Richard] Helms informed a group of senior agency officers that on September 15, President Nixon had decided that an Allende regime was not acceptable to the United States. The President asked the Agency to prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him and authorized up to $10 million for this purpose. . . . A special task force was established to carry out this mandate, and preliminary plans were discussed with Dr. Kissinger on 18 September 1970.

People are the foundation of any company’s success. The primary job of each manager is to help people be more effective in their job and to grow and develop. We have great people who want to do well, are capable of doing great things, and come to work fired up to do them. Great people flourish in an environment that liberates and amplifies that energy. Managers create this environment through support, respect, and trust. Support means giving people the tools, information, training, and coaching they need to succeed. It means continuous effort to develop people’s skills. Great managers help people excel and grow. Respect means understanding people’s unique career goals and being sensitive to their life choices. It means helping people achieve these career goals in a way that’s consistent with the needs of the company. Trust means freeing people to do their jobs and to make decisions. It means knowing people want to do well and believing that they will.

Our intellect is like a judge who decides the ‘right’ course of action. There is no dearth of information or knowledge in the world, and the mind is where all this is stored. A simple computer can beat the mind by storing many times more information than the mind can ever imagine grasping in its lifetime. But both the mind, as well as the computer, are of no use without the intellect, which alone can help them use their stored information. This makes the intellect superior to both.

Introverts typically . . . • Process information internally. It is normal for them to continuously contemplate, generate, circulate, evaluate, question, and conclude. • Are rejuvenated and energized by rest, relaxation, and down-time. • Need time to process and adapt to a new situation or setting, otherwise it is draining. • Tend to be practical, simple, and neutral in their clothing, furnishings, offices, and surroundings. • Choose their friends carefully and focus on quality, not quantity. They enjoy the company of people who have similar interests and intellect. • May resist change if they are not given enough notice to plan, prepare, and execute. Sudden change creates stress and overwhelm.

1. Did you conduct one-to-one meetings with each salesperson on your team? 2. Did you ask each of them how they like to be managed? Are they coachable? 3. Did you inquire about their prior experience with their past manager? Was it positive or negative? 4. Did you set the expectations of your relationship with them? Did you ask them what they needed and expected from their manager? What changes do they want to see? 5. Did you inform them about how you like to manage and your style of management? This would open up the space for a discussion regarding how you may manage differently from your predecessor. 6. Did you let them know you just completed a coaching course that would enable you to support them even further and maximize their talents? 7. Did you explain to them the difference between coaching and traditional management? 8. Did you enroll them in the benefits of coaching? That is, what would be in it for them? 9. Did you let them know about your intentions, goals, expectations, and aspirations for each of them and for the team as a whole? 10. How have you gone about learning the ins and outs of the company?Are you familiar with the internal workings, culture, leadership team, and subtleties that make the company unique? Have you considered that your team may be the best source of knowledge and intelligence for this? Did you communicate your willingness and desire to learn from them as well, so that the learning and development process can be mutually reciprocated?

Values constitute your personal “bottom line.” They serve as guides to action. They inform the priorities you set and the decisions you make. They tell you when to say yes and when to say no. They also help you explain the choices you make and why you made them. If you believe, for instance, that diversity enriches innovation and service, then you should know what to do if people with differing views keep getting cut off when they offer fresh ideas. If you value collaboration over individualistic achievement, then you’ll know what to do when your best salesperson skips team meetings and refuses to share information with colleagues. If you value independence and initiative over conformity and obedience, you’ll be more likely to challenge something your manager says if you think it’s wrong.

Under this scenario, in sum, we would collectively stumble our way toward a fragmented, parochial, Big Brotherish kind of information system “characterized by supervision, regulation, constraint, and control.” Moreover, given his view of the world in 1979, Lick had to rate this possibility as far more likely than his optimistic projection. An integrated, open, universally accessible Multinet wouldn’t just happen on its own, he pointed out. It would require cooperation and effort on a time scale of decades, “a long, hard process of deliberate study, experiment, analysis, and development.” That process, in turn, could be sustained only by the forging of a collective vision, some rough consensus on the part of thousands or maybe even millions of people that an open electronic commons was worth having. And that, wrote Lick, would require leadership.

Don’t be defensive. People will be reluctant to share feedback if they are afraid of hurting your feelings or having to justify their perceptions. Listen carefully. Relax and actively listen to understand what the other person is trying to tell you; be sensitive to how your nonverbal communication is affecting the other person’s willingness to share with you. Suspend judgment. Listen, don’t judge. Don’t worry about what you’re going to say, but rather work to understand what the other person is trying to tell you. Be welcoming and assume that the information is intended to help you be better rather than anything otherwise. Ask questions and ask for examples. Make sure you understand what is being said and learn about the context as well as the content. Say thank you. Let the other person know that you appreciate his or her feedback and that you can’t get any better without knowing more about yourself and how your actions affect others.

The biggest fear for homeschooled children is that they will be unable to relate to their peers, will not have friends, or that they will otherwise be unable to interact with people in a normal way. Consider this: How many of your daily interactions with people are solely with people of your own birth year?  We’re not considering interactions with people who are a year or two older or a year or two younger, but specifically people who were born within a few months of your birthday. In society, it would be very odd to section people at work by their birth year and allow you to interact only with persons your same age. This artificial constraint would limit your understanding of people and society across a broader range of ages. In traditional schools, children are placed in grades artificially constrained by the child’s birth date and an arbitrary cut-off day on a school calendar. Every student is taught the same thing as everyone else of the same age primarily because it is a convenient way to manage a large number of students. Students are not grouped that way because there is any inherent special socialization that occurs when grouping children in such a manner. Sectioning off children into narrow bands of same-age peers does not make them better able to interact with society at large. In fact, sectioning off children in this way does just the opposite—it restricts their ability to practice interacting with a wide variety of people. So why do we worry about homeschooled children’s socialization?  The erroneous assumption is that the child will be homeschooled and will be at home, schooling in the house, all day every day, with no interactions with other people. Unless a family is remotely located in a desolate place away from any form of civilization, social isolation is highly unlikely. Every homeschooling family I know involves their children in daily life—going to the grocery store or the bank, running errands, volunteering in the community, or participating in sports, arts, or community classes. Within the homeschooled community, sports, arts, drama, co-op classes, etc., are usually sectioned by elementary, pre-teen, and teen groupings. This allows students to interact with a wider range of children, and the interactions usually enhance a child’s ability to interact well with a wider age-range of students. Additionally, being out in the community provides many opportunities for children to interact with people of all ages. When homeschooling groups plan field trips, there are sometimes constraints on the age range, depending upon the destination, but many times the trip is open to children of all ages. As an example, when our group went on a field trip to the Federal Reserve Bank, all ages of children attended. The tour and information were of interest to all of the children in one way or another. After the tour, our group dined at a nearby food court. The parents sat together to chat and the children all sat with each other, with kids of all ages talking and having fun with each other. When interacting with society, exposure to a wider variety of people makes for better overall socialization. Many homeschooling groups also have park days, game days, or play days that allow all of the children in the homeschooled community to come together and play. Usually such social opportunities last for two, three, or four hours. Our group used to have Friday afternoon “Park Day.”  After our morning studies, we would pack a picnic lunch, drive to the park, and spend the rest of the afternoon letting the kids run and play. Older kids would organize games and play with younger kids, which let them practice great leadership skills. The younger kids truly looked up to and enjoyed being included in games with the older kids.

One of the biggest benefits I have found in this process, which I didn’t recognize on the front end, is by doing the spousal interview you will discover if your hire is married to crazy. Have you ever hired a great person whose crazy spouse completely took away their ability to win because they were doing maintenance on crazy? I was interviewing a very sharp young man for our broadcast department and explained to him that our final interview would be an informal dinner with his spouse. A few hours later I got a screaming and cussing phone call from his wife. She blew a gasket at the very thought that she had to be involved in her husband’s hiring. After she yelled and cussed for a minute or two she finally asked me, laced with profanity that I’ll leave out, “Why do you do this spouse interview anyway!” To which I responded, “To find people like you.” That poor guy gets his backbone ripped out every morning and maybe she gives it back to him at night if she hears a noise outside. Either he is a complete jellyfish, their marriage will end up in counseling, or they will get divorced. None of those options sounds like a productive team member. So the spousal interview might help you discover if the person is married to crazy; if they are, stay away.

Charles is difficult to pigeonhole politically. Tony Blair wrote that he considered him a “curious mixture of the traditional and the radical (at one level he was quite New Labour, at another definitely not) and of the princely and insecure.” He is certainly conservative in his old-fashioned dress and manners, his advocacy of traditional education in the arts and humanities, his reverence for classical architecture and the seventeenth-century Book of Common Prayer. But his forays into mysticism and his jeremiads against scientific progress, industrial development, and globalization give him an eccentric air. “One of the main purposes of the monarchy is to unite the country and not divide it,” said Kenneth Rose. When the Queen took the throne at age twenty-five, she was a blank slate, which gave her a great advantage in maintaining the neutrality necessary to preserve that unity. It was a gentler time, and she could develop her leadership style quietly. But it has also taken vigilance and discipline for her to keep her views private over so many decades. Charles has the disadvantage of a substantial public record of strong and sometimes contentious opinions, not to mention the private correspondence with government ministers protected by exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act that could come back to haunt him if any of it is made public. One letter that did leak was written in 1997 to a group of friends after a visit to Hong Kong and described the country’s leaders as “appalling old waxworks.

Situation awareness means possessing an explorer mentality A general never knows anything with certainty, never sees his enemy clearly, and never knows positively where he is. When armies are face to face, the least accident in the ground, the smallest wood, may conceal part of the enemy army. The most experienced eye cannot be sure whether it sees the whole of the enemy’s army or only three-fourths. It is by the mind’s eye, by the integration of all reasoning, by a kind of inspiration that the general sees, knows, and judges. ~Napoleon 5   In order to effectively gather the appropriate information as it’s unfolding we must possess the explorer mentality.  We must be able to recognize patterns of behavior. Then we must recognize that which is outside that normal pattern. Then, you take the initiative so we maintain control. Every call, every incident we respond to possesses novelty. Car stops, domestic violence calls, robberies, suspicious persons etc.  These individual types of incidents show similar patterns in many ways. For example, a car stopped normally pulls over to the side of the road when signaled to do so.  The officer when ready, approaches the operator, a conversation ensues, paperwork exchanges, and the pulled over car drives away. A domestic violence call has its own normal patterns; police arrive, separate involved parties, take statements and arrest aggressor and advise the victim of abuse prevention rights. We could go on like this for all the types of calls we handle as each type of incident on its own merits, does possess very similar patterns. Yet they always, and I mean always possess something different be it the location, the time of day, the person you are dealing with. Even if it’s the same person, location, time and day, the person you’re dealing who may now be in a different emotional state and his/her motives and intent may be very different. This breaks that normal expected pattern.  Hence, there is a need to always be open-minded, alert and aware, exploring for the signs and signals of positive or negative change in conditions. In his Small Wars journal article “Thinking and Acting like an Early Explorer” Brigadier General Huba Wass de Czege (US Army Ret.) describes the explorer mentality:   While tactical and strategic thinking are fundamentally different, both kinds of thinking must take place in the explorer’s brain, but in separate compartments. To appreciate this, think of the metaphor of an early American explorer trying to cross a large expanse of unknown terrain long before the days of the modern conveniences. The explorer knows that somewhere to the west lies an ocean he wants to reach. He has only a sketch-map of a narrow corridor drawn by a previously unsuccessful explorer. He also knows that highly variable weather and frequent geologic activity can block mountain passes, flood rivers, and dry up desert water sources. He also knows that some native tribes are hostile to all strangers, some are friendly and others are fickle, but that warring and peace-making among them makes estimating their whereabouts and attitudes difficult.6

The clear transmission of facts and evidence becomes irrelevant in the hyperemotional space of social media. Facts come from a world external to ourselves—namely, reality. Actually, that’s the whole point. But in the social media world, they are either meaningless or threatening to the self we’re constructing and protecting. The world can’t help but degrade into “It’s all about me.” Deluged with information filtered through the lens of popular self, our internal monitoring causes the world to shrink: Did the news make me feel bad? Turn it off. Did that comment upset me? Blast the messenger. Did that criticism hurt me? Get depressed or strike back. This is the tragedy of self-reference where, instead of responding to information from the external environment to create an orderly system of relationships, the narrow band of information obsessively processed creates isolation, stress, and self-defense.6 Focused internally, the outside world where facts reside doesn’t have meaning. Our communication with one another via the Web generates extreme reactions. Think about how small events take over the Internet because people get upset from a photo and minimal information. There doesn’t have to be any basis in fact or any understanding of more complex reasons for why this event happened. People see the visual, comment on it, and viral hysteria takes over. Even when more context is given later that could help people understand the event, it doesn’t change their minds. People go back to scanning and posting, and soon there is another misperceived event to get hysterical about. One commentator calls this “infectious insanity.”7

These include: 1.Do the Right Thing—the principle of integrity. We see in George Marshall the endless determination to tell the truth and never to curry favor by thought, word, or deed. Every one of General Marshall’s actions was grounded in the highest sense of integrity, honesty, and fair play. 2.Master the Situation—the principle of action. Here we see the classic “know your stuff and take appropriate action” principle of leadership coupled with a determination to drive events and not be driven by them. Marshall knew that given the enormous challenges of World War II followed by the turbulent postwar era, action would be the heart of his remit. And he was right. 3.Serve the Greater Good—the principle of selflessness. In George Marshall we see a leader who always asked himself, “What is the morally correct course of action that does the greatest good for the greatest number?” as opposed to the careerist leader who asks “What’s in it for me?” and shades recommendations in a way that creates self-benefit. 4.Speak Your Mind—the principle of candor. Always happiest when speaking simple truth to power, General and Secretary Marshall never sugarcoated the message to the global leaders he served so well. 5.Lay the Groundwork—the principle of preparation. As is often said at the nation’s service academies, know the six Ps: Prior Preparation Prevents Particularly Poor Performance. 6.Share Knowledge—the principle of learning and teaching. Like Larry Bird on a basketball court, George Marshall made everyone on his team look better by collaborating and sharing information. 7.Choose and Reward the Right People—the principle of fairness. Unbiased, color- and religion-blind, George Marshall simply picked the very best people. 8.Focus on the Big Picture—the principle of vision. Marshall always kept himself at the strategic level, content to delegate to subordinates when necessary. 9.Support the Troops—the principle of caring. Deeply involved in ensuring that the men and women under his command prospered, General and Secretary Marshall taught that if we are loyal down the chain of command, that loyalty will be repaid not only in kind but in operational outcomes as well.

Mandal vs Mandir The V.P. Singh government was the biggest casualty of this confrontation. Within the BJP and its mentor, the RSS, the debate on whether or not to oppose V.P. Singh and OBC reservations reached a high pitch. Inder Malhotra | 981 words It was a blunder on V.P. Singh’s part to announce his acceptance of the Mandal Commission’s report recommending 27 per cent reservations in government jobs for what are called Other Backward Classes but are, in fact, specified castes — economically well-off, politically powerful but socially and educationally backward — in such hot haste. He knew that the issue was highly controversial, deeply emotive and potentially explosive, which it proved to be instantly. But his top priority was to outsmart his former deputy and present adversary, Devi Lal. He even annoyed those whose support “from outside” was sustaining him in power. BJP leaders were peeved that they were informed of what was afoot practically at the last minute in a terse telephone call. What annoyed them even more was that the prime minister’s decision would divide Hindu society. The BJP’s ranks demanded that the plug be pulled on V.P. Singh but the top leadership advised restraint, because it was also important to keep the Congress out of power. The party leadership was aware of the electoral clout of the OBCs, who added up to 52 per cent of the population. As for Rajiv Gandhi, he was totally and vehemently opposed to the Mandal Commission and its report. He eloquently condemned V.P. Singh’s decision when it was eventually discussed in Parliament. This can be better understood in the perspective of the Mandal Commission’s history. Having acquired wealth during the Green Revolution and political power through elections, the OBCs realised that they had little share in the country’s administrative apparatus, especially in the higher rungs of the bureaucracy. So they started clamouring for reservations in government jobs. Throughout the Congress rule until 1977, this demand fell on deaf ears. It was the Janata government, headed by Morarji Desai, that appointed the Mandal Commission in 1978. Ironically, by the time the commission submitted its report, the Janata was history and Indira Gandhi was back in power. She quietly consigned the document to the deep freeze. In Rajiv’s time, one of his cabinet ministers, Shiv Shanker, once asked about the Mandal report.

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.