Several Leadership Quotes

Jesus said several times, “Come, follow me.” His was a program of “do what I do,” rather than “do what I say.” His innate brilliance would have permitted him to put on a dazzling display, but that would have left his followers far behind. He walked and worked with those he was to serve. His was not a long-distance leadership. He was not afraid of close friendships; he was not afraid that proximity to him would disappoint his followers. The leaven of true leadership cannot lift others unless we are with and serve those to be led.

She turned back to the cards and tapped the Ace of Cups. "You're on the verge of a new beginning, a rebirth of great power and emotion. Your life will change, but it will be change that takes you in the direction that, while difficult, will ultimatley illuminate the world." "Whoa," I said. Rhonda then pointed to the Empress. "Power and leadership lie ahead of you, which you will handle with grace and intelligence. The seeds are already in place, though there's an edge of uncertainty-an enigmatic set of influences that hang around you like a mist." Her attention was on the Moon as she said those words. "But my overall impression is that those unknown factors won't deter you from your destiny." Lissa's eyes were wide. "You can teel that just from the cards?" ... After several moments of heavy silence, she said, "You will destroy that which is undead." i waited about thirty seconds for her to continue, but she didn't. "Wait, that's it?" ... Her eyes flickered over the cards, looked at Dimitri, then looked back at the cards. Her expression was blank. "You will lose what you value most, so treasure it while you can." She pointed to the Wheel of Fortune card. "The wheel is turning, always turning.

You can’t afford to limit your joy. It has been proven several times that angry people are never happy people.

Allah's Messenger ﷺ fought [with us] in severe heat, struggling on our long journey, against the desert and the great strength of the enemy.

I have found that there are three key steps to identifying your own core personal projects. First, think back to what you loved to do when you were a child. How did you answer the question of what you wanted to be when you grew up? The specific answer you gave may have been off the mark, but the underlying impulse was not. If you wanted to be a fireman, what did a fireman mean to you? A good man who rescued people in distress? A daredevil? Or the simple pleasure of operating a truck? If you wanted to be a dancer, was it because you got to wear a costume, or because you craved applause, or was it the pure joy of twirling around at lightning speed? You may have known more about who you were then than you do now. Second, pay attention to the work you gravitate to. At my law firm I never once volunteered to take on an extra corporate legal assignment, but I did spend a lot of time doing pro bono work for a nonprofit women’s leadership organization. I also sat on several law firm committees dedicated to mentoring, training, and personal development for young lawyers in the firm. Now, as you can probably tell from this book, I am not the committee type. But the goals of those committees lit me up, so that’s what I did. Finally, pay attention to what you envy. Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth. You mostly envy those who have what you desire.

Bob was not a jokester, and his severe demeanor intimidated most people. Word at the Bureau was that he had knee surgery not long after 9/11 and declined anesthesia in favor of biting on a leather belt.

Charisma helps us understand several curious features of fascist leadership. The notorious indolence of Hitler,45 far from making Nazism more tepid, freed his subordinates to compete in driving the regime toward ever more extreme radicalization.

He aspires to rule my Barony, yet he cannot rule himself.

People who repeatedly find career success learn to broaden their perspective and understand that there are always several roads to getting where you want to go.

Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public's total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public's contempt for survivors. Fame, this special kind, feeds itself on outrage, on what the counselors of lesser men would consider bad publicity-hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs. Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide. (Is it clear I was a hero of rock'n'roll?) Toward the end of the final tour it became apparent that our audience wanted more than music, more even than its own reduplicated noise. It's possible the culture had reached its limit, a point of severe tension. There was less sense of simple visceral abandon at our concerts during these last weeks. Few cases of arson and vandalism. Fewer still of rape. No smoke bombs or threats of worse explosives. Our followers, in their isolation, were not concerned with precedent now. They were free of old saints and martyrs, but fearfully so, left with their own unlabeled flesh. Those without tickets didn't storm the barricades, and during a performance the boys and girls directly below us, scratching at the stage, were less murderous in their love of me, as if realizing finally that my death, to be authentic, must be self-willed- a succesful piece of instruction only if it occured by my own hand, preferrably ina foreign city. I began to think their education would not be complete until they outdid me as a teacher, until one day they merely pantomimed the kind of massive response the group was used to getting. As we performed they would dance, collapse, clutch each other, wave their arms, all the while making absolutely no sound. We would stand in the incandescent pit of a huge stadium filled with wildly rippling bodies, all totally silent. Our recent music, deprived of people's screams, was next to meaningless, and there would have been no choice but to stop playing. A profound joke it would have been. A lesson in something or other. In Houston I left the group, saying nothing, and boarded a plane for New York City, that contaminated shrine, place of my birth. I knew Azarian would assume leadership of the band, his body being prettiest. As to the rest, I left them to their respective uproars- news media, promotion people, agents, accountants, various members of the managerial peerage. The public would come closer to understanding my disappearance than anyone else. It was not quite as total as the act they needed and nobody could be sure whether I was gone for good. For my closest followers, it foreshadowed a period of waiting. Either I'd return with a new language for them to speak or they'd seek a divine silence attendant to my own. I took a taxi past the cemetaries toward Manhattan, tides of ash-light breaking across the spires. new York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague. The cab driver was young, however, a freckled kid with a moderate orange Afro. I told him to take the tunnel. Is there a tunnel?" he said.

Lincoln never forgot that in a democracy the leader’s strength ultimately depends on the strength of his bond with the people. In the mornings he set aside several hours to hear the needs of the ordinary people lined up outside his office, his time of “public opinion baths.” Kindness, empathy, humor, humility, passion, and ambition all marked him from the start. But he grew, and continued to grow, into a leader who became so powerfully fused with the problems tearing his country apart that his desire to lead and his need to serve coalesced into a single indomitable force. That force has not only enriched subsequent leaders but has provided our people with a moral compass to guide us. Such leadership offers us humanity, purpose, and wisdom, not in turbulent times alone, but also in our everyday lives.

One who voluntarily deprives oneself of food may live twice as long as one who is forced to be without food. Similarly, you can choose to go without water for several days, but if you are deprived of it, you die more quickly. The older men survived because they had resaons to live - a garden to finish, a wife to see to, and grandchildren to help raise - whereas the younger men had less encouraging them to return (from battle). Strong wills become more crucial than strong bodies. It was this principle that inspired the establishment of Outward Bound. Yet, more than two millennia earlier, Alexander led his troops out of the desert with this same principle.

A severe attack of rheumatoid arthritis sent him to the hospital for six weeks at the end of 1918. Cautioned that he might be required to use a wheelchair for the remainder of his days, he said, “All right! I can work that way, too.

Behind this manufactured political dereliction, time knocked at our doorstep on several occasions to decide whether to enter the progressive world or to remain confined in a medievalist belief which serves only the feudal class and their monstrous egos.

TAKING 100% RESPONSIBILITY PROCESS STEP 1: Identify an issue/complaint about anything going on in your life. State the complaint in “unenlightened” terms. Be dramatic. Ham it up. Blame overtly. STEP 2: Step into 100% responsibility. Physically find a place in the room that represents your internal shift to being 100% responsible for the situation. STEP 3: Gain insight by completing these statements, repeating each of them several times, until you have what feels like a breakthrough: From the past this reminds me of… I keep this issue going by… What I get from keeping this issue going is… The lifelong pattern I’m noticing is… I can demonstrate 100% responsibility concerning this issue by… STEP 4: If during Step 3, you do not experience a shift, go back to Step 1 and repeat the process.

in towns and villages throughout the Ukraine, several thousand Jews were being murdered by anti-Bolshevik Whites, whose historic anti-Semitism, combining with a new hatred of the noted Jewish presence among the Bolshevik leadership, renewed the violent pogroms of a decade and a half earlier.

The job of the Federal Reserve is “to know when to remove the punch bowl at the party.” Under Alan Greenspan’s leadership its motto became “let’s all get drunk and see what happens.” It is now the morning after and the world will be dealing with Greenspan’s hangover for the next several decades.

Several things give me the courage to do something when I’m afraid. I focus on the why, the reason I need to do the task. I remind myself that others have already accomplished the feat. If them, why not me? I take the fear and break it into manageable pieces. I stay focused on one step at a time. After completing the first step, I move to the next. People have different temperaments,

No longer was a defection, a leaked document, or some other treasonous act a prerequisite for being deemed an SP, though only serious offenses like those would seem to merit such severe condemnation. It meant, after all, expulsion from the church and the loss of salvation—a severe penalty. But now anyone who expressed even the smallest criticism of church policy or leadership was in danger of being cast out.

There are a number of subjective and objective criteria that I use as a way to rank players. The subjective ones include their ability with both feet; their sense of balance; the disciplined fashion in which they take care of their fitness; their attitude towards training; the consistency between games and over multiple seasons; their demonstrated mastery in several different positions; and the way they add flair to any team for which they play. The objective ones that are impossible to dispute are: the number of goals they have scored; the games they have played for several of the best club teams in the world; the number of League championship and cup medals they have won, and their appearances in World Cups. When you employ this sort of measurement approach, it becomes far easier to define the very highest levels of performance. The people who are least confused about this are other players.

Healthy and nutritious foods are less likely to be available in predominantly black neighbor's, while candy bars, and alcohol, and low-cost fast food are more likely to be in abundance. Consistently studies have shown that these factors are related to race, independent of income. All of this puts Black communities at higher risk of developing more severe COVID 19. So do more densely packed neighborhoods with less green space, more poorly ventilated living arrangements, and more frequent use of public transportation.

None of them was impressed with Gravel, who at present was their commander. He had, in their eyes, failed them. He had sent Meadows and Downs out on missions that were foredoomed. It wasn’t all his fault, because he was getting pushed around from above, and he had complained about it bitterly and consistently. But part of being a leader was being able to push up as well as down. You didn’t ask men to risk everything on a mission that you did not believe in yourself. Gravel had been doing this now for several days. The men knew when they were being misused. This was the real deal, not some classroom exercise. These were blood decisions. They were the most important ones a military commander is asked to make. If you knew more because of where you were and what you saw, then you stood your ground. You didn’t just protest; if need be, you refused. You put your judgment on the line. This might destroy your career—hell, it would certainly destroy your career—but you accepted that, because whatever happened to you, your career, your reputation, these were minor things by comparison. Lives were at stake. A real leader knew his responsibility was not first and foremost to himself; it was to his men, and the mission. What mattered in combat, what really mattered, was not only understanding why you asked men to risk their lives, but making them understand. Men would willingly risk their lives, but they needed to know that it counted. And they needed to know they had a chance. If the commander believed those things himself, he could convince his men. The problem here was that neither the young company commanders nor Gravel held that belief.

The facts of the case were straightforward: Hillary Clinton had used her personal email system, on a server and with an email address that was entirely of her own creation, to conduct her work as secretary of state. She set the server up several months after taking office. For the first few months of her tenure, she had used a personal AT&T BlackBerry email address before switching to a Clintonemail.com domain. In the course of doing her work, she emailed with other State employees. In the course of emailing those people, the inspector general discovered, she and they talked about classified topics in the body of dozens of their emails.

Bin Laden practiced intensive operational security. He was wary of telephones. He allowed no Afghans into his personal bodyguard, only Arabs he had known and trusted for many years. He varied his routes, did not stay in any one place for long, and never told anyone but his Arab inner circle about his plans. These practices limited the effectiveness of the CIA’s recruitments because the agency’s sources and paid agents were mainly Afghans who were kept at bay by bin Laden’s core bodyguard and leadership group. The CIA was unable to penetrate the inner circle, but bin Laden did have one security weakness, as agency operatives saw it: his several wives.

We ought to care for those closest to us in terms of relatedness. After our immediate family, we ought to pursue our calling diligently as employees and provide just incentives (perhaps through profit-sharing) and reasonable care for our workers as employers. We should seek the wisdom of teachers and elders in society and look to them for leadership, while rejecting their folly when it is discerned. We must put our children and their education, both at home and in school, before our own entertainment, pleasure, and success. We ought not to tolerate insolence or haughtiness in them; nor ought we to punish them too severely, but should lead them as good teachers, by example and patient instruction.

A group of pastors was attending a conference at our church, and at the end of the first morning session, they headed to the fellowship center for lunch. Several minutes later I followed, expecting that they would already be seated. Much to my surprise, all one hundred fifty of them were lined up outside the door. Then I saw why. At the head of the line stood Joel, my then six-year-old, with both hands raised, giving orders. “It will be a couple more minutes and then they’ll be ready for you!” Joel had no clue what was going on, but he gave directions with the greatest of confidence and these pastors did as they were told. Confidence is contagious even if it’s the confidence of a six-year-old. The

When, then, the Social Democrat worker found himself in the economic crisis which degraded him to the status of a coolie, the development of his revolutionary sentiments was severely retarded by the conservative structuralization that had been taking shape in him for decades. Either he remained in the camp of the Social Democrats, notwithstanding his criticism and rejection of their policies, or he went over to the NSDAP [Nazi party] in search of a better replacement. Irresolute and indecisive, owing to the deep contradiction between revolutionary and conservative sentiments, disappointed by his own leadership, he followed the line of least resistance. Whether he would give up his conservative tendencies and arrive at a complete consciousness of his actual responsibility in the production process, i.e., at a revolutionary consciousness, depended solely on the correct or incorrect leadership of the revolutionary party. Thus the communist assertion that it was the Social Democrat policies that put fascism in the saddle was correct from a psychological viewpoint. Disappointment in Social Democracy, accompanied by the contradiction between wretchedness and conservative thinking, must lead to fascism if there are no revolutionary organizations. For example, following the fiasco of the Labor party's policies in England, in 1930–31, fascism began to infiltrate the workers who, then, in the election of 1931, cut away to the Right, instead of going over to communism.

In the next few years, however, the US began to step up aid to China and imposed increasingly severe economic sanctions against Japan. Since the island nation depended almost totally on imports of critical raw materials such as oil, rubber, and scrap iron, and because it considered territorial expansion vital to the procurement of natural resources and to its future as a great power, Japan’s leadership viewed this containment as a mortal threat. As Japanese ambassador Kichisaburō Nomura told Washington on December 2, 1941, “The Japanese people believe . . . that they are being placed under severe pressure by the United States to yield to the American position; and that it is preferable to fight rather than to yield to pressure.”141

When we shift from talking about the problems of community to talking about the breakdown of community, something changes. Naming the challenge as the “breakdown of community” opens the way for restoration.Holding on to the view that community is a set of problems to be solved holds us in the grip of retribution. At every level of society, we live in the landscape of retribution. The retributive community is sustained by several aspects of the modern community conversation, which I will expand on throughout the book: the marketing of fear and fault, gravitation toward more laws and oversight, an obsession with romanticized leadership, marginalizing hope and possibility, and devaluing associational life to the point of invisibility.

Your job as an EntreLeader is to make sure when your team member leaves your office they take their monkey with them. The first step is to give them some ideas for options and instruct them to come back with three good ways to solve the problem and a suggested course of action. The next step is to teach your team to come to your office with a problem only after they have found three or more possible solutions and a suggested course of action. That makes for some great discussions and teachable moments as you show them how you would make the call. After solving problems and making the call with your help several times, the best team members begin to see the pattern you use and can do what you do. The final step is very personally rewarding.

There are several explanations offered as to why women have lower aspirations than men, including that women feel there is a lack of fit between themselves (their personal characteristics) and senior leadership positions, which are often characterized in highly masculine terms; women feel there are too many obstacles to overcome; women do not want to prioritize career over family; women place less important than do men on job characteristics common to senior roles, such as high pay, power, and prestige; gender role socialization influences girls' and women's attitudes and choices about occupational achievement; and women are more often located in jobs that lack opportunities for advancement and they lower their aspirations in response to this disadvantageous structural position. (p.191)

I don’t claim that depression invariably leads to realism, nor that mania always enhances creativity, nor that depression on every occasion increases empathy, nor that hyperthymia inevitably promotes resilience. Rather, I argue that, on the whole, more often than not, those mental illnesses enhance or promote those qualities more frequently than is the case in the absence of those mental illnesses. Some people with manic-depressive illness are unrealistic (even psychotic), unempathic, and unresilient. We shouldn’t romanticize this condition; in its most extreme forms, it is highly disabling and dangerous. But most people have less severe forms of these illnesses; there will be many more manic-depressive leaders showing the beneficial traits discussed in this book than manic-depressive leaders who are dangerously crazy.

Consider almost any public issue. Today’s Democratic Party and its legislators, with a few notable individual exceptions, is well to the right of counterparts from the New Deal and Great Society eras. In the time of Lyndon Johnson, the average Democrat in Congress was for single-payer national health insurance. In 1971, Congress overwhelmingly passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, for universal, public, tax-supported, high-quality day care and prekindergarten. Nixon vetoed the bill in 1972, but even Nixon was for a guaranteed annual income, and his version of health reform, “play or pay,” in which employers would have to provide good health insurance or pay a tax to purchase it, was well to the left of either Bill or Hillary Clinton’s version, or Barack Obama’s. The Medicare and Medicaid laws of 1965 were not byzantine mash-ups of public and private like Obamacare. They were public. Infrastructure investments were also public. There was no bipartisan drive for either privatization or deregulation. The late 1960s and early 1970s (with Nixon in the White House!) were the heyday of landmark health, safety, environmental, and financial regulation. To name just three out of several dozen, Nixon signed the 1970 Clean Air Act, the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the 1973 Consumer Product Safety Act. Why did Democrats move toward the center and Republicans to the far right? Several things occurred. Money became more important in politics. The Democratic Leadership Council, formed by business-friendly and Southern Democrats after Walter Mondale’s epic 1984 defeat, believed that in order to be more competitive electorally, Democrats had to be more centrist on both economic and social issues.

It has been noted in various quarters that the half-illiterate Italian violin maker Antonio Stradivari never recorded the exact plans or dimensions for how to make one of his famous instruments. This might have been a commercial decision (during the earliest years of the 1700s, Stradivari’s violins were in high demand and open to being copied by other luthiers). But it might also have been because, well, Stradivari didn’t know exactly how to record its dimensions, its weight, and its balance. I mean, he knew how to create a violin with his hands and his fingers but maybe not in figures he kept in his head. Today, those violins, named after the Latinized form of his name, Stradivarius, are considered priceless. It is believed there are only around five hundred of them still in existence, some of which have been submitted to the most intense scientific examination in an attempt to reproduce their extraordinary sound quality. But no one has been able to replicate Stradivari’s craftsmanship. They’ve worked out that he used spruce for the top, willow for the internal blocks and linings, and maple for the back, ribs, and neck. They’ve figured out that he also treated the wood with several types of minerals, including potassium borate, sodium and potassium silicate, as well as a handmade varnish that appears to have been composed of gum arabic, honey, and egg white. But they still can’t replicate a Stradivarius. The genius craftsman never once recorded his technique for posterity. Instead, he passed on his knowledge to a number of his apprentices through what the philosopher Michael Polyani called “elbow learning.” This is the process where a protégé is trained in a new art or skill by sitting at the elbow of a master and by learning the craft through doing it, copying it, not simply by reading about it. The apprentices of the great Stradivari didn’t learn their craft from books or manuals but by sitting at his elbow and feeling the wood as he felt it to assess its length, its balance, and its timbre right there in their fingertips. All the learning happened at his elbow, and all the knowledge was contained in his fingers. In his book Personal Knowledge, Polyani wrote, “Practical wisdom is more truly embodied in action than expressed in rules of action.”1 By that he meant that we learn as Stradivari’s protégés did, by feeling the weight of a piece of wood, not by reading the prescribed measurements in a manual. Polyani continues, To learn by example is to submit to authority. You follow your master because you trust his manner of doing things even when you cannot analyze and account in detail for its effectiveness. By watching the master and emulating his efforts in the presence of his example, the apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules of the art, including those which are not explicitly known to the master himself. These hidden rules can be assimilated only by a person who surrenders himself to that extent uncritically to the imitation of another.

DuPont, for 130 years, had confined itself to making munitions and explosives. In the mid-1920s it then organized its first research efforts in other areas, one of them the brand-new field of polymer chemistry, which the Germans had pioneered during World War I. For several years there were no results at all. Then, in 1928, an assistant left a burner on over the weekend. On Monday morning, Wallace H. Carothers, the chemist in charge, found that the stuff in the kettle had congealed into fibers. It took another ten years before DuPont found out how to make Nylon intentionally. The point of the story is, however, that the same accident had occurred several times in the laboratories of the big German chemical companies with the same results, and much earlier. The Germans were, of course, looking for a polymerized fiber—and they could have had it, along with world leadership in the chemical industry, ten years before DuPont had Nylon. But because they had not planned the experiment, they dismissed its results, poured out the accidentally produced fibers, and started all over again.

Insecure leaders are dangerous - to themselves, their followers, and the organizations they lead. That's because a leadership position becomes an amplifier of personal flaws. Whatever negative baggage you have in life only gets heavier when you're trying to lead others. Unsure leaders have several common traits: 1. They don't provide security for others - To become an effective leader, you need to make your followers feel good about themselves. 2. They take more from people than they give - Insecure people are on a continual quest for validation, acknowledgment, and love. Because of that, their focus is on finding security, not instilling it in others. 3. They continually limit their best people - Show me an insecure leader, and I'll show you someone who cannot genuinely celebrate victories. The leader might even take credit personally for the best work of the team. 4. They continually limit their organization - When followers are undermined and receive no recognition, they become discouraged and eventually stop performing at their potential. And when that happens, the entire organization suffers.

White turned the sheet of paper around and looked at it for several seconds. Then he began to laugh.  After a few moments, MacDonald said, “What's funny?”  White's laughter stopped as quickly as it had begun. He wiped his eyes and blew his nose. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I wasn't laughing at the answer. I don't begin to understand half of what's here. But that's obviously a father and a mother. and a son—a child—and the Capellans would have no way of knowing whether they were white or black.”  When he and John had returned to Washington, what would he say to John? That he had ordered a great man to hide his greatness, to destroy what he had built? He knew what that would do to John, what it would do to their relationship. On the one hand he preached leadership of the revolution; on the other, he rejected leadership in others.  "It's only your own vision you can see,” John would say. “To others’ visions you are blind."  What would he say? What if John was right?  What if the revolution were done, as much as leaders could do for it, and now it was up to the individual? What if the important battle now was to allow individual greatness once more to be expressed, to open up society again?

The former South African archbishop Desmond Tutu used to famously say, “We are prisoners of hope.” Such a statement might be taken as merely rhetorical or even eccentric if you hadn’t seen Bishop Tutu stare down the notorious South African Security Police when they broke into the Cathedral of St. George’s during his sermon at an ecumenical service. I was there and have preached about the dramatic story of his response more times than I can count. The incident taught me more about the power of hope than any other moment of my life. Desmond Tutu stopped preaching and just looked at the intruders as they lined the walls of his cathedral, wielding writing pads and tape recorders to record whatever he said and thereby threatening him with consequences for any bold prophetic utterances. They had already arrested Tutu and other church leaders just a few weeks before and kept them in jail for several days to make both a statement and a point: Religious leaders who take on leadership roles in the struggle against apartheid will be treated like any other opponents of the Pretoria regime. After meeting their eyes with his in a steely gaze, the church leader acknowledged their power (“You are powerful, very powerful”) but reminded them that he served a higher power greater than their political authority (“But I serve a God who cannot be mocked!”). Then, in the most extraordinary challenge to political tyranny I have ever witnessed, Archbishop Desmond Tutu told the representatives of South African apartheid, “Since you have already lost, I invite you today to come and join the winning side!” He said it with a smile on his face and enticing warmth in his invitation, but with a clarity and a boldness that took everyone’s breath away. The congregation’s response was electric. The crowd was literally transformed by the bishop’s challenge to power. From a cowering fear of the heavily armed security forces that surrounded the cathedral and greatly outnumbered the band of worshipers, we literally leaped to our feet, shouted the praises of God and began…dancing. (What is it about dancing that enacts and embodies the spirit of hope?) We danced out of the cathedral to meet the awaiting police and military forces of apartheid who hardly expected a confrontation with dancing worshipers. Not knowing what else to do, they backed up to provide the space for the people of faith to dance for freedom in the streets of South Africa.

in my name to train young women for global leadership. Wellesley’s twelfth and thirteenth presidents, Diana Chapman Walsh and Kim Bottomly, embraced the idea and, over several years, helped put the pieces together. In January 2010, I traveled to Massachusetts for the inaugural session. The Albright Institute was founded on the belief that a student doesn’t have to major in international relations to have a global mind-set. By giving young women the chance to work in partnership with peers from a variety of disciplines and countries, we encourage them to see differences of perspective as a strength and even as a tool to help solve complex problems. To that end, we provide an intense course of study over a three-week period between the fall and spring semesters, complemented by summer internships. Of the hundreds of Wellesley juniors and seniors who apply annually, forty are selected. In the first two weeks of each session, we offer classes run by professors, former government officials, nonprofit leaders, and businesspeople. During the final seven days, the fellows work in teams to analyze and make recommendations regarding a thorny international problem. At the end, they present their findings, which we pick apart and discuss.

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.

there was a human interest segment about a street sweeper on the evening news. I think he worked in Philadelphia. He was a black gentleman and swept streets the old-fashioned way, with one of those wide, stiff bristle brooms and a wheeled garbage can. He had a wife and several children and lived in a modest home. It was a loving family, and he had high ambitions for his children. He enjoyed his job very much and felt he was providing a worthwhile service to his community. He had only one professional ambition in life and that was to get promoted to drive one of those mechanized street sweepers with big round brushes. He finally achieved his ambition and was promoted to driving a street sweeping machine. His wife and children were proud of him. The television piece closed with him driving down the street; a huge smile was on his face. He knew who he was and what he was. I run that video piece through my mind every few months as a reality check. Here is a man happy in his work, providing an essential service for his community, providing for his family, who love and respect him. Have I been more successful in what is truly important in life than he has been? No, we have both been fortunate. He has touched all the important bases in the game of life. When we are ultimately judged, despite my titles and medals, he may have a few points on me, and on a lot of others I know.

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

What is it like to be made vice-president? On one level, it's a nearly hallucinatory degree of success. I was barely forty years old, and a shaky, sixty-three-year-old heartbeat from the leadership of the entire Western world. It was also like throwing up in convention-hall bathrooms before giving speeches, and after. It was sitting through dinners with men and women with whom I had nothing in common. Spending an enormous amount of time on trains. Promising thins and agreeing to things as advised by people I had barely met, on very little sleep. Huge sums of money were changing hands and everything happening on the grandest scale imaginable while still in most moments remaining pointless and usually outright seedy. I pretended to learn to fly-fish; I watched sporting events. In Maine I was assaulted by a lobster; it seized my lapel in a threatening manner. I tasted local foods and admired factories,farms, department stores, hotels, and (unless I'm misremembering) several empty plots of land.... It was like being given what was almost the nation's highest honor by a man you held in infinite esteem and regarded with perhaps a certain amount of terrified suspicion, a man who disliked you and clearly wanted nothing to do with you, who would scowl and change the subject at the mention of your name. And then being given a very important and very nasty job by that person, and despised for it, almost as much as you despised yourself.

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!

Endorsement of the ordination of women is not the final step in the process, however. If we look at the denominations that approved women’s ordination from 1956–1976, we find that several of them, such as the United Methodist Church and the United Presbyterian Church (now called the Presbyterian Church–USA), have large contingents pressing for (a) the endorsement of homosexual conduct as morally valid and (b) the approval of homosexual ordination. In fact, the Episcopal Church on August 5, 2003, approved the appointment of an openly homosexual bishop.16 In more liberal denominations such as these, a predictable sequence has been seen (though so far only the Episcopal Church has followed the sequence to point 7): 1. abandoning biblical inerrancy 2. endorsing the ordination of women 3. abandoning the Bible’s teaching on male headship in marriage 4. excluding clergy who are opposed to women’s ordination 5. approving homosexual conduct as morally valid in some cases 6. approving homosexual ordination 7. ordaining homosexuals to high leadership positions in the denomination17 I am not arguing that all egalitarians are liberals. Some denominations have approved women’s ordination for other reasons, such as a long historical tradition and a strong emphasis on gifting by the Holy Spirit as the primary requirement for ministry (as in the Assemblies of God), or because of the dominant influence of an egalitarian leader and a high priority on relating effectively to the culture (as in the Willow Creek Association). But it is unquestionable that theological liberalism leads to the endorsement of women’s ordination. While not all egalitarians are liberals, all liberals are egalitarians. There is no theologically liberal denomination or seminary in the United States today that opposes women’s ordination. Liberalism and the approval of women’s ordination go hand in hand.

He made a costly error in judgement and sent an entire regiment into a virtual slaughterhouse. It happens frequently. Officers risk their troops' lives for the sake of a promotion. Not my father. He valued the life of every man under his command, from his officers to the humblest fresh recruit. When he realized what had happened, he was devastated. He couldn't ever forget that his error had cost the lives of so many men, created so many widows and orphans..." "But, Lyon, measured against his valor, one mistake is forgivable." "To us, yes. Not to him. He was sickened that the battle was hailed as one of the turning points of the war. He was decorated for it. It was considered a great victory, but it defeated him as a soldier, as a man. When he came home and was hailed a hero, he couldn't stand the conflict within himself. He didn't feel like a hero. He felt like a traitor." "That can't be!" "Not a traitor to his country, but to the men who had trusted his judgement and leadership. It was a conflict he never could reconcile, so he retired from the Army and came here and shut out the world and all reminders of the lie he was living." They were quiet for a moment before she said,"No one would have thrown stones at him, Lyon. he was a respected man, a hero, a leader at a time in history when America needed heroes and leaders. It was a battleground that spread out for miles. Admist all the chaos he may have thought he made a mistake when he actually didn't." "I know that, Andy, and you know that, but since the time I was old enough to understand his reclusiveness, I was never able to convince him of it. He died still regretting that one day in his life as though he had live no other. It didn't matter what the public would have thought if they had known. He judged himself more severely than anyone else could have." "How tragic for him. He was such a lovely man, Lyon. Such a lovely man.

It’s not always so easy, it turns out, to identify your core personal projects. And it can be especially tough for introverts, who have spent so much of their lives conforming to extroverted norms that by the time they choose a career, or a calling, it feels perfectly normal to ignore their own preferences. They may be uncomfortable in law school or nursing school or in the marketing department, but no more so than they were back in middle school or summer camp. I, too, was once in this position. I enjoyed practicing corporate law, and for a while I convinced myself that I was an attorney at heart. I badly wanted to believe it, since I had already invested years in law school and on-the-job training, and much about Wall Street law was alluring. My colleagues were intellectual, kind, and considerate (mostly). I made a good living. I had an office on the forty-second floor of a skyscraper with views of the Statue of Liberty. I enjoyed the idea that I could flourish in such a high-powered environment. And I was pretty good at asking the “but” and “what if” questions that are central to the thought processes of most lawyers. It took me almost a decade to understand that the law was never my personal project, not even close. Today I can tell you unhesitatingly what is: my husband and sons; writing; promoting the values of this book. Once I realized this, I had to make a change. I look back on my years as a Wall Street lawyer as time spent in a foreign country. It was absorbing, it was exciting, and I got to meet a lot of interesting people whom I never would have known otherwise. But I was always an expatriate. Having spent so much time navigating my own career transition and counseling others through theirs, I have found that there are three key steps to identifying your own core personal projects. First, think back to what you loved to do when you were a child. How did you answer the question of what you wanted to be when you grew up? The specific answer you gave may have been off the mark, but the underlying impulse was not. If you wanted to be a fireman, what did a fireman mean to you? A good man who rescued people in distress? A daredevil? Or the simple pleasure of operating a truck? If you wanted to be a dancer, was it because you got to wear a costume, or because you craved applause, or was it the pure joy of twirling around at lightning speed? You may have known more about who you were then than you do now. Second, pay attention to the work you gravitate to. At my law firm I never once volunteered to take on an extra corporate legal assignment, but I did spend a lot of time doing pro bono work for a nonprofit women’s leadership organization. I also sat on several law firm committees dedicated to mentoring, training, and personal development for young lawyers in the firm. Now, as you can probably tell from this book, I am not the committee type. But the goals of those committees lit me up, so that’s what I did. Finally, pay attention to what you envy. Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth. You mostly envy those who have what you desire. I met my own envy after some of my former law school classmates got together and compared notes on alumni career tracks. They spoke with admiration and, yes, jealousy, of a classmate who argued regularly before the Supreme Court. At first I felt critical. More power to that classmate! I thought, congratulating myself on my magnanimity. Then I realized that my largesse came cheap, because I didn’t aspire to argue a case before the Supreme Court, or to any of the other accolades of lawyering. When I asked myself whom I did envy, the answer came back instantly. My college classmates who’d grown up to be writers or psychologists. Today I’m pursuing my own version of both those roles.

Fascism rested not upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader’s mystical union with the historic destiny of his people, a notion related to romanticist ideas of national historic flowering and of individual artistic or spiritual genius, though fascism otherwise denied romanticism’s exaltation of unfettered personal creativity. The fascist leader wanted to bring his people into a higher realm of politics that they would experience sensually: the warmth of belonging to a race now fully aware of its identity, historic destiny, and power; the excitement of participating in a vast collective enterprise; the gratification of submerging oneself in a wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing one’s petty concerns for the group’s good; and the thrill of domination. Fascism’s deliberate replacement of reasoned debate with immediate sensual experience transformed politics, as the exiled German cultural critic Walter Benjamin was the first to point out, into aesthetics. And the ultimate fascist aesthetic experience, Benjamin warned in 1936, was war. Fascist leaders made no secret of having no program. Mussolini exulted in that absence. “The Fasci di Combattimento,” Mussolini wrote in the “Postulates of the Fascist Program” of May 1920, “. . . do not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form.” A few months before he became prime minister of Italy, he replied truculently to a critic who demanded to know what his program was: “The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better.” “The fist,” asserted a Fascist militant in 1920, “is the synthesis of our theory.” Mussolini liked to declare that he himself was the definition of Fascism. The will and leadership of a Duce was what a modern people needed, not a doctrine. Only in 1932, after he had been in power for ten years, and when he wanted to “normalize” his regime, did Mussolini expound Fascist doctrine, in an article (partly ghostwritten by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile) for the new Enciclopedia italiana. Power came first, then doctrine. Hannah Arendt observed that Mussolini “was probably the first party leader who consciously rejected a formal program and replaced it with inspired leadership and action alone.” Hitler did present a program (the 25 Points of February 1920), but he pronounced it immutable while ignoring many of its provisions. Though its anniversaries were celebrated, it was less a guide to action than a signal that debate had ceased within the party. In his first public address as chancellor, Hitler ridiculed those who say “show us the details of your program. I have refused ever to step before this Volk and make cheap promises.” Several consequences flowed from fascism’s special relationship to doctrine. It was the unquestioning zeal of the faithful that counted, more than his or her reasoned assent. Programs were casually fluid. The relationship between intellectuals and a movement that despised thought was even more awkward than the notoriously prickly relationship of intellectual fellow travelers with communism. Many intellectuals associated with fascism’s early days dropped away or even went into opposition as successful fascist movements made the compromises necessary to gain allies and power, or, alternatively, revealed its brutal anti-intellectualism. We will meet some of these intellectual dropouts as we go along. Fascism’s radical instrumentalization of truth explains why fascists never bothered to write any casuistical literature when they changed their program, as they did often and without compunction. Stalin was forever writing to prove that his policies accorded somehow with the principles of Marx and Lenin; Hitler and Mussolini never bothered with any such theoretical justification. Das Blut or la razza would determine who was right.

SEIU along with several pro-immigrant groups called on President Obama not to issue a moratorium on deportations but precisely the opposite, insisting he take no executive action to alter his deportation policy until House Republicans had time to work out a deal. “We believe the president should move cautiously and give the House leadership all of the space they may need to bring legislation to the floor for a vote.” That is, they demanded that Obama not unilaterally change his policy that has led to the deportation of 2 million immigrants so as not to antagonize the Right.

I have been struck by how families, corporations, and other kinds of institutions are constantly trying to cure their own chronic ills through amputations, “strong medicine,” transfusions, and other forms of surgery, only to find that, even when successful for the moment, the excised tumor returns several years later in “cells” that never knew the “cells” that left.

Still others implement the latest and greatest technique just because the instructor was from this or that organization. This can be dangerous for several reasons. First, there are a slew of instructors who are one-hit wonders out in the community. One type of instructor is the trainer who has been to all the schools, and their walls are covered by certificates, but they have never kicked in a door on an actual mission. The problem here is the schoolbook answer versus the reality-tried-and-tested answer.

At this point, it may be of value to revisit the United States involvement in the rise of the “Colonels in Greece” and the Juntas in Latin America. Just after WWII, Britain and the United States intervened in the Greek civil war on behalf of the fascists against the Greek left which had successfully ousted the Nazis from Greece—a formidable feat given that Britain had intervened during WWII against the left-wing guerillas. With the help of Britain and the United States, the fascists prevailed in the post-WWII civil war in Greece and “instituted a highly brutal regime, for which the CIA created a suitably repressive internal security agency (KYP in Greek),”8 just as it had helped create the repressive SAVAK in Iran. The fascist government erected a statue of Harry S. Truman in Athens as thanks for the United States’ role in the coup under his leadership. This statue has been blown up, rebuilt, and blown up again several times. And then, much to the chagrin of both Britain and America, democracy broke out again in Greece—the country which, as we all know, invented democracy—when liberal George Papandreou was elected in 1964. Just before the 1967 elections which Papandreou was sure to win again, a joint effort of Britain, the CIA, Greek Military, KYP and US military stationed in Greece brought about a military coup which brought the fascists back to power. And, as with the Shah in Iran, the new rightist government immediately instituted “martial law, censorship, arrests, beatings, and killing, the victims totaling 8,000 in the first month. … Torture, inflicted in the most gruesome ways, often with equipment supplied by the United States, became routine.”9 Sound familiar?

The New Testament reading for the day was 2 Corinthians 10:12-17 in which Paul talks about the danger of comparing ourselves to others and measuring ourselves against their accomplishments. His antidote for this all-too-human tendency was to learn to stay within the limits of his own life and calling. He says, “We, however, will not boast beyond limits, but will keep within the field that God has assigned to us, to reach out even as far as you. For we were not overstepping our limits when we reached you. . . . We do not boast beyond limits, that is, in the labors of others; but our hope is that, as your faith increases, our sphere of action among you may be greatly enlarged” (2 Corinthians 10:13-15). Until that very moment I had never realized that Paul used the word limits three times in just a few verses and that he seemed to be very clear about the limits and boundaries of his calling. He knew the field God had given him to work, and he knew better than to go outside it. He knew that there was a sphere of action and influence that had been given to him by God, and he would not go beyond it unless God enlarged his field. Paul seemed to grapple honestly with the reality of limitations in several different ways in his writings, and, in fact, this seemed to be part of his maturing as a leader who was both gifted and called. When he wrote about not thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought (Romans 12:3), he was making a very general statement about limiting our grandiosity and pride by cultivating a realistic sense of our essential nature. He was talking about being willing to live within the limits and the possibilities of who we really are. As he matured, he revealed a very personal understanding that his deep struggle with a thorn in the flesh was a gift that was given to him to limit his own grandiosity and keep him in touch with his humanness. In 2 Corinthians 4 he talked about what it is like to carry the treasure of ministry in fragile, earthen vessels. He wrote poignantly from his experience of his own human limitations and his conviction that it is precisely in our willingness to carry God’s luminous presence in such fragile containers—without pretending to be anything more than what we are—that the power

awkward televised hug from the new president of the United States. My curtain call worked. Until it didn’t. Still speaking in his usual stream-of-consciousness and free-association cadence, the president moved his eyes again, sweeping from left to right, toward me and my protective curtain. This time, I was not so lucky. The small eyes with the white shadows stopped on me. “Jim!” Trump exclaimed. The president called me forward. “He’s more famous than me.” Awesome. My wife Patrice has known me since I was nineteen. In the endless TV coverage of what felt to me like a thousand-yard walk across the Blue Room, back at our home she was watching TV and pointing at the screen: “That’s Jim’s ‘oh shit’ face.” Yes, it was. My inner voice was screaming: “How could he think this is a good idea? Isn’t he supposed to be the master of television? This is a complete disaster. And there is no fricking way I’m going to hug him.” The FBI and its director are not on anyone’s political team. The entire nightmare of the Clinton email investigation had been about protecting the integrity and independence of the FBI and the Department of Justice, about safeguarding the reservoir of trust and credibility. That Trump would appear to publicly thank me on his second day in office was a threat to the reservoir. Near the end of my thousand-yard walk, I extended my right hand to President Trump. This was going to be a handshake, nothing more. The president gripped my hand. Then he pulled it forward and down. There it was. He was going for the hug on national TV. I tightened the right side of my body, calling on years of side planks and dumbbell rows. He was not going to get a hug without being a whole lot stronger than he looked. He wasn’t. I thwarted the hug, but I got something worse in exchange. The president leaned in and put his mouth near my right ear. “I’m really looking forward to working with you,” he said. Unfortunately, because of the vantage point of the TV cameras, what many in the world, including my children, thought they saw was a kiss. The whole world “saw” Donald Trump kiss the man who some believed got him elected. Surely this couldn’t get any worse. President Trump made a motion as if to invite me to stand with him and the vice president and Joe Clancy. Backing away, I waved it off with a smile. “I’m not worthy,” my expression tried to say. “I’m not suicidal,” my inner voice said. Defeated and depressed, I retreated back to the far side of the room. The press was excused, and the police chiefs and directors started lining up for pictures with the president. They were very quiet. I made like I was getting in the back of the line and slipped out the side door, through the Green Room, into the hall, and down the stairs. On the way, I heard someone say the score from the Packers-Falcons game. Perfect. It is possible that I was reading too much into the usual Trump theatrics, but the episode left me worried. It was no surprise that President Trump behaved in a manner that was completely different from his predecessors—I couldn’t imagine Barack Obama or George W. Bush asking someone to come onstage like a contestant on The Price Is Right. What was distressing was what Trump symbolically seemed to be asking leaders of the law enforcement and national security agencies to do—to come forward and kiss the great man’s ring. To show their deference and loyalty. It was tremendously important that these leaders not do that—or be seen to even look like they were doing that. Trump either didn’t know that or didn’t care, though I’d spend the next several weeks quite memorably, and disastrously, trying to make this point to him and his staff.

suggested to the entire workforce that they read Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” one of the most important things I ever read. Inspired in part by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, King’s letter is about seeking justice in a deeply flawed world. I have reread it several times since first encountering it in college. Because I knew that the FBI’s interaction with the civil rights movement, and Dr. King in particular, was a dark chapter in the Bureau’s history, I wanted to do something more. I ordered the creation of a curriculum at the FBI’s Quantico training academy. I wanted all agent and analyst trainees to learn the history of the FBI’s interaction with King, how the legitimate counterintelligence mission against Communist infiltration of our government had morphed into an unchecked, vicious campaign of harassment and extralegal attack on the civil rights leader and others. I wanted them to remember that well-meaning people lost their way. I wanted them to know that the FBI sent King a letter blackmailing him and suggesting he commit suicide. I wanted them to stare at that history, visit the inspiring King Memorial in Washington, D.C., with its long arcs of stone bearing King’s words, and reflect on the FBI’s values and our responsibility to always do better. The FBI Training Division created a curriculum that does just that. All FBI trainees study that painful history and complete the course by visiting the memorial. There, they choose one of Dr. King’s quotations from the wall—maybe “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” or “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy”—and then write an essay about the intersection of that quotation and the FBI’s values. The course doesn’t tell the trainees what to think. It only tells them they must think, about history and institutional values. Last I checked, the course remains one of the highest-rated portions of their many weeks at Quantico.

Though Giuliani’s confidence was exciting, it fed an imperial style that severely narrowed the circle of people with whom he interacted, something I didn’t realize was dangerous until much later: a leader needs the truth, but an emperor does not consistently hear it from his underlings. Rudy’s demeanor left a trail of resentment among the dozens of federal judges in Manhattan, many of whom had worked in that U.S. Attorney’s office. They thought he made the office about one person, himself, and used publicity about his cases as a way to foster his political ambitions rather than doing justice. It was a resentment that was still palpable when I became the chief federal prosecutor in Manhattan—and sat in Giuliani’s chair—a dozen years later.

As we were arriving at this decision, one of the lawyers on the team asked a searing question. She was a brilliant and quiet person, whom I sometimes had to invite into the conversation. “Should you consider that what you are about to do may help elect Donald Trump president?” she asked. I paused for several seconds. It was of course the question that was on everyone’s mind, whether they expressed it out loud or not. I began my reply by thanking her for asking that question. “It is a great question,” I said, “but not for a moment can I consider it. Because down that path lies the death of the FBI as an independent force in American life. If we start making decisions based on whose political fortunes will be affected, we are lost.

Underdevelopment points out the disparity between the rich countries in Europe and North America and countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. A trip down history lane tells that the developed nations deeply exploited the developing countries, ultimately leaving them severely crippled. Slavery and colonialism served as the epitome of this exploitation where the Europeans built and developed their economies at the expense of the developing countries. Although we are in the 21st century, the new political, economic, and cultural world order that is powered by globalization perpetrates neocolonialism. Similarly, democracy has had its role in upholding underdevelopment as it involves the conversion of structures, practices, and institutions to resemble those of developed countries. Finally, poor leadership in developing countries contributes as it focuses on leaders amassing wealth. Therefore, developing countries need strong leadership within individual countries and in coalition with others to resists the forces of neocolonialism. Reviewing trade liberalization will allow local firms to flourish. They also need to lobby for more participation in global bodies such as the international monetary fund and the World Bank to make them accountable to underdeveloped communities.

Hereditary leadership was unknown. Men became chiefs by their prowess in war; and because he must ever be generous, a chief was usually a poor man. With the Blackfeet, as with the other Indians of the Northwestern plains, a chieftainship had to be maintained by constant demonstration of personal ability. It might easily be lost in a single day, since these independent tribesmen were free to choose their leaders, and were quick to desert a weak or cowardly character. This independence was instilled in the children of the plains people. They were never whipped, or severely punished. The boys were constantly lectured by the old men of the tribes, exhorted to strive for renown as warriors, and to die honorably in battle before old age came to them. The names of tribal heroes were forever upon the tongues of these teachers; and everywhere cowardice was bitterly condemned. A coward was forbidden to marry, and he must at all times wear women’s clothing.

$20M in sales, our leadership team was dysfunctional and divided. Prior to this, our culture had earned several “Best Places to Work” accolades, and our performance was repeatedly acknowledged by Inc. Magazine’s, Inc. 5000 award, and Ernst & Young honored our success as a finalist for their Entrepreneur of the year award.

I have lived and worked in the Washington, D. C., metropolitan area for almost four decades. During this period I have watched families and institutions recycle their problems for several generations, despite enormous efforts to be innovative. The opportunity to observe this firsthand was provided by my involvement in the major institutions designed by our civilization to foster change: religion, education, psychotherapy, and politics (I have been here since Eisenhower). That experience included twenty years as a pulpit rabbi, an overlapping twenty-five years as an organizational consultant and family therapist with a broadly ecumenical practice, and several years of service as a community relations specialist for the Johnson White House helping metropolitan areas throughout the United States to voluntarily desegregate housing, before Congress passed appropriate civil rights legislation. Eventually, the accumulation of this experience began to show me how similar all of our “systems of salvation” are in their structure, the way they formulate problems, the range of their approaches, and their rationalizations for their failures. It was, indeed, the basic similarity in their thinking processes, despite their different sociological classifications, that first led me to consider the possibility that our constant failure to change families and institutions fundamentally has less to do with finding the right methods than with misleading emotional and conceptual factors that reside within society itself. For

Don’t complain of terrible circumstances. It has been proven several times that they are the sources of celebrated trophies.

Not long into his 2010 TED talk on creativity and leadership, Derek Sivers plays a video clip of a crowd at an outdoor concert. A young man without a shirt starts dancing by himself. The audience members seated nearby look on curiously. “A leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous,” Derek says. Soon, however, a second young man joins the first and starts dancing. “Now comes the first follower with a crucial role … the first follower transforms the lone nut into a leader.” As the video continues, a few more dancers join the group. Then several more. Around the two-minute mark, the dancers have grown into a crowd. “And ladies and gentlemen, that’s how a movement is made.”1

Here is the story, which I have abridged (with acknowledgement to Sergey Parkhomenko, journalist and broadcaster, who reported it): The River Ob makes a turn at Kolpashevo, and every year it eats away a few feet of a sand cliff there. On April 30, 1979, the Ob's waters eroded another six-foot section of bank. Hanging from the newly exposed wall were the arms, legs and heads of people who had been buried there. A cemetery at least several yards wide had been exposed. The bodies had been packed in and layered tightly. Some of the skulls from the uppermost layer rolled out from the sandbank, and little boys picked them up and began playing with them. News of the burial spread quickly and people started gathering at the sandbank. The police and neighbourhood watch volunteers quickly cordoned off the whole thing. Shortly afterwards, they built a thick fence around the crumbling sandbank, warning people away. The next day, the Communist Party called meeting in the town, explaining that those buried were traitors and deserters from the war. But the explanation wasn't entirely convincing. If this were so, why was everyone dressed in civilian clothes? Why had women and children been executed as well? And from where, for that matter, did so many deserters come in a town of just 20,000 people? Meanwhile, the river continued to eat away at the bank and it became clear that the burial site was enormous; thousands were buried there. People could remember that there used to be a prison on these grounds in the late 1930s. It was general knowledge that there were executions there, but nobody could imagine just how many people were shot. The perimeter fence and barbed wire had long ago been dismantled, and the prison itself was closed down. But what the town's people didn't know was that Kolpashevo's prison operated a fully-fledged assembly line of death. There was a special wooden trough, down which a person would descend to the edge of a ditch. There, he'd be killed by rifle fire, the shooter sitting in a special booth. If necessary, he'd be finished off with a second shot from a pistol, before being added to the next layer of bodies, laid head-to-toe with the last corpse. Then they'd sprinkle him lightly with lime. When the pit was full, they filled in the hole with sand and moved the trough over a few feet to the side, and began again. But now the crimes of the past were being revealed as bodies fell into the water and drifted past the town while people watched from the shore. In Tomsk, the authorities decided to get rid of the burial site and remove the bodies. The task, it turned out, wasn't so easy. Using heavy equipment so near a collapsing sandbank wasn't wise and there was no time to dig up all the bodies by hand. The Soviet leadership was in a hurry. Then from Tomsk came new orders: two powerful tugboats were sent up the Ob, right up to the riverbank, where they were tied with ropes to the shore, facing away from the bank. Then they set their engines on full throttle. The wash from the ships' propellers quickly eroded the soft riverbank and bodies started falling into the water, where most of them were cut to pieces by the propellers. But some of the bodies escaped and floated away downstream. So motorboats were stationed there where men hooked the bodies as they floated by. A barge loaded with scrap metal from a nearby factory was moored near the boats and the men were told to tie pieces of scrap metal to the bodies with wire and sink them in the deepest part of the river. The last team, also composed of local men from the town, worked a bit further downstream where they collected any bodies that had got past the boats and buried them on shore in unmarked graves or sank them by tying the bodies to stones. This cleanup lasted almost until the end of the summer.

When he met with the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, I accompanied him as his note taker. I will never forget Brzezinski introducing me to Sadat not as his aide or staff assistant but as his “colleague.” It was a tiny gesture of respect, but one I remember vividly nearly forty years later. Zbig was a demanding boss but unfailingly polite to those who worked for him. I was lucky to work for several such bosses, including the national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and the DCI William Webster. The gangster Al Capone allegedly once said, “You can get a lot more done with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone.” Still, never underestimate the power of a kind word.

From its ancient roots to its modern application, the practical utility of the Enneagram has been appropriated by the CIA to profile world leaders, written about in The Paris Review, Newsweek, Forbes, and CNN.com, and taught in graduate courses at several academic institutions, including Stanford University. The Enneagram is even used to explain leadership styles and decision making styles in the workplace.

If you’re having a conversation with someone who is stuck personally or professionally, then it’s likely they are trying to see how many problems they can shove “on their fork” at the same time. Do they realize they are piling up multiple problems like their own little pasta mountain? Probably not. Will putting several problems together as if they were one problem create a mess? Absolutely.

In 1931, Japan went broke—i.e., it was forced to draw down its gold reserves, abandon the gold standard, and float its currency, which depreciated it so greatly that Japan ran out of buying power. These terrible conditions and large wealth gaps led to fighting between the left and the right. By 1932, there was a massive upsurge in right-wing nationalism and militarism, in the hope that order and economic stability could be forcibly restored. Japan set out to get the natural resources (e.g., oil, iron, coal, and rubber) and human resources (i.e., slave labor) it needed by seizing them from other countries, invading Manchuria in 1931 and spreading out through China and Asia. As with Germany, it could be argued that Japan’s path of military aggression to get needed resources was more cost-effective than relying on classic trading and economic practices. In 1934, there was severe famine in parts of Japan, causing even more political turbulence and reinforcing the right-wing, militaristic, nationalistic, and expansionistic movement. In the years that followed, Japan’s top-down fascist command economy grew stronger, building a military-industrial complex to protect its existing bases in East Asia and northern China and support its excursions into other countries. As was also the case in Germany, while most Japanese companies remained privately held, their production was controlled by the government. What is fascism? Consider the following three big choices that a country has to make when selecting its approach to governance: 1) bottom-up (democratic) or top-down (autocratic) decision making, 2) capitalist or communist (with socialist in the middle) ownership of production, and 3) individualistic (which treats the well-being of the individual with paramount importance) or collectivist (which treats the well-being of the whole with paramount importance). Pick the one from each category that you believe is optimal for your nation’s values and ambitions and you have your preferred approach. Fascism is autocratic, capitalist, and collectivist. Fascists believe that top-down autocratic leadership, in which the government directs the production of privately held companies such that individual gratification is subordinated to national success, is the best way to make the country and its people wealthier and more powerful.

Several SEALs had patches that read, “More Cowbell,” inspired by the popular Saturday Night Live Will Ferrell skit of the band, Blue Oyster Cult.

My religious upbringing and practical studies of economics and unemployment in which I had been engaged at Oxford combined in one single thought: unemployment was not only a severe fault of government, but it was in some way evil, and an affront to the country it afflicted.

There are several plausible reasons I’ve been able to ascertain over the years as to why I wasn’t taught about dinosaurs from a biblical viewpoint — and how to defend it. Here are the top three: 1. My parents were unaware that I was being brainwashed with the secular humanistic view about dinosaurs, so they never even bothered to look into the subject to help me. My parents (like many parents) were under the impression that schools were “neutral” (neutrality is a myth by the way, Matthew 12:3010), and they figured schools wouldn’t teach something contrary to Christianity in schools. 2. The church leadership (e.g., Sunday School teachers, elders, deacons, and pastors) didn’t know we were being taught a secular religion at school — ideas like the big bang, millions of years, and evolution, which are subsets of the religion of secular humanism and naturalism. 3. Even if the church leadership knew about the secular indoctrination happening at school, I doubt some of them would have known how to respond themselves, mainly due to their own lack of knowledge about dinosaurs from a biblical viewpoint.

I was not always self-motivated. There were patches (occasions in my twenties and thirties) where my motivation would plummet, often for weeks on end. So, I have been on both sides and have a wider perspective. Based on that, I can tell you there will be several major career reasons why you should motivate yourself and not rely on others to push you. If you are a leader (or a wannabe leader) you must be inspired and fully engaged at work. Because if you don’t motivate yourself, how will you motivate others?

Buying more and more of the best land, sometimes owning multiple estates spread across several states, extended plantation families - fathers who provided sons and sons-in-law with a start - created slaveholding conglomerates that controlled hundreds and sometimes thousands of slaves. The grandees' vast wealth allowed them to introduce new hybrid cotton seeds and strains of cane, new technologies, and new forms of organization that elevated productivity and increased profitability. In some places, the higher levels of capitalization and technical mastery of the grandees reduced white yeomen to landlessness and forced smallholders to move on or else enter the wage-earning class as managers or overseers. As a result, the richest plantation areas became increasingly black, with ever-larger estates managed from afar as the planters retreated to some local country seat, one of the region's ports, or occasionally some northern metropolis. Claiming the benefits of their new standing, the grandees - characterized in various places as 'nabobs,' 'a feudal aristocracy,' or simply 'The Royal Family' - established their bona fides as a ruling class. They built great houses strategically located along broad rivers or high bluffs. They named their estates in the aristocratic manner - the Briars, Fairmont, Richmond - and made them markers on the landscape. Planters married among themselves, educated their sons in northern universities, and sent their wives and daughters on European tours, collecting the bric-a-brac of the continent to grace their mansions. Reaching out to their neighbors, they burnished their reputations for hospitality. The annual Christmas ball or the great July Fourth barbecue were private events with a public purpose. They confirmed the distance between the planters and their neighbors and allowed leadership to fall lightly and naturally on their shoulders, as governors, legislators, judges, and occasionally congressmen, senators, and presidents.

The answer to this question is that trustees need a new view of people at their best in institutional roles. That view can be simply stated: No person is complete; no one is to be entrusted with all. Completeness is to be found only in the complementary talents of several who relate as equals. This flouts one of the time-honored assumptions—almost an axiom—of administrative lore: “You cannot manage by committee! Delegation of authority must be made to an individual.

The new assumption is that delegation of authority from trustees to operating executives is best made to a team of several persons whose exceptional talents are complementary and who relate to one another as equals, under the leadership of a primus inter pares (as discussed in the last chapter).

A star business is the leader in its market niche To be the leader simply means that it is bigger intheniche than any other firm. We measure size by sales value (also known as revenues or turnover). If the venture has sales of $1 million and there is nobody whose sales in the same niche reach $1 million, then it is the leader. Note that ‘leadership’ is objectively defined by sales, and has nothing to do with competing claims about ‘being the best’ or being most highly rated by customers, which are difficult to judge and not as important anyway. The thing that matters most is how customers in the niche vote with their money. Has a question just popped up in your mind? ‘Ah,’ you may say, ‘but how do you define what the market niche is?’ That is indeed a profound question, and I will answer it with several examples throughout the book. It is possible to get the definition of the niche wrong - as I sometimes have. But the basic idea is very simple. For a niche to be a separate market, it must have different customers, different products or services and a different way of doing business from the main market or other market niches. Finally, the ranking of competitors is different in a valid market niche - the leader in the niche is different from the leader in the main market. If there is no difference in how competitors fare in the niche versus the main market, the niche is not really different.

Learning actually saved me several times as I was growing up.

For example, having been in the rare position of working in the fields of both healing and management, I could not help but notice that the batting average in the war on cancer and the batting average in the struggle to heal chronically troubled institutions are remarkably similar, with cancer perhaps a little ahead. I have been struck by how families, corporations, and other kinds of institutions are constantly trying to cure their own chronic ills through amputations, “strong medicine,” transfusions, and other forms of surgery only to find that, even when successful for the moment, the excised tumor returns several years later in “cells” that never knew the “cells” that left. “New blood” rarely thwarts malignant processes, anywhere. Indeed, with both cancer and institutions, malignant cells that appear to be dead can often revive if they receive new nourishment. Or, to put the problem another way, when we say something has gone into remission, where do we think it has gone?

Hysteria! And grief and bitterness. That's what goes on. Not satisfied that our fighters evacuated the city, the enemy went after their women and children whom they left behind in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, slaughtered them, and left their bodies stacked in grotesque piles in the muddy lanes, fly-covered, rotting in the sun. They went after our Palestine Research Center the repository of our culture and history in exile, whose treasures we had been collecting since the day we left Palestine, looted it then burned it to the ground. Fifteen thousand of our people, including boys under the age if twelve and men over the age of eighty, were picked up and put in a concentration camp called Ansar. Our community in Lebanon, half a million men, women, and children found itself suddenly severed from institutions (educational, medical, cultural, economic, and social) they had depended on for their everyday living, which the enemy destroyed. Our fighters, the mainspring of our national struggle, were shipped to thre deserts of Algeria, the outback of Sudan, and the scorching plain of Yemen. Our leadership sought refuge in Tunisia. And when the choked psyche of our nation gasped for air, some months later, we lunged atat each other in civil war, because we had failed our people and ourselves. Our promises had proved illusory.

Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations—disappeared not because the people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion, government weakness—weakness through lack of leadership in government.

But what actually happened was, first, Horkman and I had to climb down our side of the ravine, which was hard because those guns are a lot heavier than they look, plus it was really steep. We both kept dropping the guns and falling down, so we ended up mostly sliding on our butts, which took a while. The Cubans tried to keep cheering, but after a while they realized they’d better pace themselves. Like every twenty seconds or so, one of them would go, “YI-YI-YI!” But you could tell they were losing the mood. Plus—I’m just going to come right out and say this—I had to take a shit. I mean, bad. Which is something that never happens in the movies. You never see Rambo take a shit. You never see whatshisname, the guy in those Bourne movies, Matt Damon, when he and his co-star hot babe are fleeing through some foreign city and he’s killing enemy agents with kung fu, speaking nine languages, hot-wiring a car and driving like a stuntman, etc., you never hear him say to the babe, “Geez, I’m sorry, but even though those enemy agents are, like, twenty yards behind us shooting at us, I need to make a pit stop, because if I don’t get to a toilet right now I’m going to turn this car into a septic tank.” That’s the way I felt, when Horkman and I got to the bottom of the ravine. I had a cramp in my gut like I was about to give birth to a walrus. I had no choice but to drop my pants right then and there. “What are you doing?” Horkman said. “What does it look like I’m doing?” I said. “You can’t at least go behind something?” he said. “Go behind what, asshole?” I said, because (a) there was nothing to go behind, and (b) Horkman is an asshole. “I don’t believe this,” said Horkman. He walked about ten yards and sat down on a rock, facing away. Thanks a lot, douchenozzle. So there I was, squatting, and I don’t want to get too specific here, but it was a severe firehose situation. I was splattering the gravel big-time, plus there was a certain amount of gas noise, plus you had the natural echo in the ravine. I don’t think this was what the Cubans were expecting in the way of military leadership. I could hear them up there talking about me, and then one of them went “YI-YI-YI!” definitely sarcastically, and then they were all laughing. Assholes. Like they never had diarrhea in a ravine. I firehosed for I would say a good three

narcissism levels have increased significantly among college students over the past several decades.

lying produces few to no severe sanctions, lying increases in frequency.

Which can be compared with the statements of Rockefeller himself after his 1973 visit to the People’s Republic of China:   “The social experiment of China under Chairman Mao's leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history." (New York Times, "From a China Traveler," August 10, 1973) “... the family unit is broken up...The children are taken away from the parents and placed in government-run nurseries...The parents may see their children once a week and when they see them they cannot show affection toward the children. The idea is to have the children and the family sever their affection and direct it toward the state. Names are taken away from the children and they are given numbers. There is no individual identity... The commune system is destroying morality in Red China: There is no morality because the love of the family is taken away. There is no honesty and respect among men or between men. There is no human dignity: they are all like animals. There is no guilt associated with murder of individuals for the improvement of the state…

psychoanalysis has proved less successful as a critique of culture in general for several reasons: the oligarchic style of leadership, its establishment in private institutions and refusal to join in the debate of the University, its attempts to stay linked with the medical, and scientific, establishment, and, perhaps most importantly, its eventually exclusive focus on the mental pathology of individuals and theorising restricted to treatment aims within a medical model.

knew that judges had no idea what they were deciding upon. They had not actually spent any time in the tenement housing looking the poor in the eye, smelling the stench of rotting tobacco and foul bedding. Almost a century later, in the 1970s, the business leadership saying “management by wandering around” became popular, a style of managing whereby executives walked through the workforce in an unstructured manner, just listening and interpreting. Several historians believe that it was Abraham Lincoln who first implemented the informal management style when he visited Union Army camps to inspect the troops in the early part of the Civil War. For Roosevelt, the Cigar Bill incident was a learning experience: leaders learn best by interpreting a situation firsthand.

Baron Steuben, well schooled in the iron régime of Frederick the Great, came over from Prussia, joined Washington at Valley Forge, and day after day drilled and manœuvered the men, laughing and cursing as he turned raw countrymen into regular soldiers. From France came young Lafayette and the stern De Kalb, from Poland came Pulaski and Kosciusko;—all acquainted with the arts of war as waged in Europe and fitted for leadership as well as teaching. Lafayette came early, in 1776, in a ship of his own, accompanied by several officers of wide experience, and remained loyally throughout the war sharing the hardships of American army life. Pulaski fell at the siege of Savannah and De Kalb at Camden. Kosciusko survived the American war to defend in vain the independence of his native land. To these distinguished foreigners, who freely threw in their lot with American revolutionary fortunes, was due much of that spirit and discipline which fitted raw recruits and temperamental militiamen to cope with a military power of the first rank. The Soldiers.—As far as the British soldiers were concerned their annals are short and simple. The regulars from the standing army who were sent over at the opening of the contest, the recruits drummed up by special efforts at home, and the thousands of Hessians bought outright by King George presented few problems of management to the British officers. These common soldiers were far away from home and enlisted for the war. Nearly all of them were well disciplined and many of them experienced in actual campaigns. The armies of King George fought bravely, as

Several forms of thinking play a crucial role in preparing and readying us for conflict, violence or crisis.  These include the “if – then or when-then thinking; when X happens, then I will do… Y”. Positive self-talk and visualizing the situation are positive tools that develop patterns in your mind (like any other form of training) in an effort to anticipate threats as we explore the situation, make an situational assessment and plan  an adaptable response to a predator we can’t fully anticipate. We need to become students of human behavior, both normal and aberrant, to rapidly recognize the difference between the two and be ready to instantly respond correctly and accurately.  Inherent in this understands the various dimensions of aberrant behavior between deviant, dangerous, suspicious, under the influence, and psychiatric.

Despite several millennia of building best business practices, despite all the analysis and planning, and forced discipline and structure, what makes us human will never be cleaved from how work gets done.

To prove the existence of a worldwide conspiracy one needs to bring up facts that cannot be denied by opponents of such a principle. The imminence of such a worldwide conspiracy is, along with other facts confirmed, by the existence of organizations that rank above the separate states. These organizations have been operating behind the scenes of official world politics for several decades. Whoever wants to understand how and why political decisions come about needs to study these organizations and their objectives. The real answers cannot be found with the government of the United States or other political powers of this world. In reality the politics of countries are not determined by democratically chosen representatives, but by these powerful organizations and our invisible elite. Many investigators have tried to uncover this worldwide conspiracy. These investigators stem from all ranks of society. In spite of this, they all agree on the existence of this conspiracy. Sooner or later every investigator that researches this matter will come across the secret Brotherhood of the Illuminati. This organization was officially founded in 1530 in Spain. Their goals are based on the famous Constantinople Letter of December 22, 1489, in which plans were made to conquer the leadership of the world.[33] In 1773 the plans stipulated in the Constantinople Letter were restored, modernized and developed further in consultation

Several years ago, Debashish Chatterjee, a good friend and well-known author on leadership1 opened a seminar on leadership at MIT by saying, ‘I’ve been guided in my work by the notion that older is often better. If an idea has been around for a few thousand years, it’s been submitted to many tests—which is a good indicator that it might have some real merit. We’re fixated on newness, which often misleads us into elevating novelty over substance.

For the last several decades, the church leadership culture as a whole has despised Small Churches.

Glenn Hammond Curtiss was a bicycle enthusiast before he started building motorcycles. Although he only attended grammar school to the 8th grade, his interests motivated him to move on to greater things. In 1904, as a self-taught engineer, he began to manufacture engines for airships. During this time, Curtiss became known for having won a number of international air races and for making the first long-distance flight in the United States. On September 30, 1907, Curtiss was invited to join a non-profit pioneering research program named the “Aerial Experimental Association,” founded under the leadership of Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, to develop flying machines. The organization was established having a fixed time period, which ended in March of 1909. During this time, the members produced several different aircraft in a cooperative, rather than a competitive, spirit.

In the late 1990s, Parachute was the market leader with more than 50 per cent market share. Fresh from its success in taking market share in toothpaste away from Colgate using Pepsodent, HUL entered the coconut oil category to take on Marico. Dadiseth, the then chairman of HUL, had warned Mariwala to sell Marico to HUL or face dire consequences. Mariwala decided to take on the challenge. Even the capital markets believed that Marico stood no chance against the might of HUL which resulted in Marico’s price-to-earnings ratio dipping to as low as 7x, as against 13x during its listing in 1996. As part of its plans to take on Marico, HUL relaunched Nihar in 1998, acquired Cococare from Redcon and positioned both brands as price challengers to Parachute. In addition, HUL also increased advertising and promotion spends for its brands. In one quarter in FY2000, HUL’s advertising and promotional (A&P) spend on coconut oil alone was an amount which was almost equivalent to Marico’s full year A&P budget (around Rs 30 crore). As Milind Sarwate, former CFO of Marico, recalls, ‘Marico’s response was typically entrepreneurial and desi. We quickly realized that we have our key resource engine under threat. So, we re-prioritized and focused entirely on Parachute. We gave the project a war flavour. For example, the business conference on this issue saw Mariconians dressed as soldiers. The project was called operation Parachute ki Kasam. The leadership galvanized the whole team. It was exhilarating as the team realized the gravity of the situation and sprang into action. We were able to recover lost ground and turn the tables, so much so that eventually Marico acquired the aggressor brand, Nihar.’ Marico retaliated by relaunching Parachute: (a) with a new packaging; (b) with a new tag line highlighting its purity (Shuddhata ki Seal—or the seal of purity); (c) by widening its distribution; and (d) by launching an internal sales force initiative. Within twelve months, Parachute regained its lost share, thus limiting HUL’s growth. Despite several relaunches, Nihar failed against Parachute. Eventually, HUL dropped the brand Nihar off its power brand list before selling it off to Marico in 2006. Since then, Parachute has been the undisputed leader in the coconut oil category. This leadership has ensured that when one visits the hair oil section in a retail store, about 80 per cent of the shelves are occupied by Marico-branded hair oil.

David strode through the battle raging between his men and the castle defenders in the courtyard and headed straight for the keep, intent on his goal. The castle would fall quickly. The defenders lacked leadership and were in disarray. His only concern was whether the castle had a secret tunnel for escape. During the siege, he had spread his men out through the fields surrounding the fortress to keep watch. But he had concentrated his forces for the attack and most were now inside the castle. If there was a tunnel, he must secure the widow and her daughters before they had a chance to escape. He did not relish the idea of having to chase them down through the fields with dogs. The defenders had foolishly waited too long to withdraw to the keep, and most were caught in the courtyard when David’s men burst through the gate. He barely spared them a glance as he ran up the steps of the keep. With several of his warriors at his back, he burst through the doors brandishing his sword. He paused inside the entrance to hall. Women and children were screaming, and the few Blackadder warriors who had made it inside were overturning tables in a useless attempt to set up a defense. “If ye hope for mercy, drop your weapons,” David shouted, making his voice heard above the chaos. He locked gazes with the men who hesitated to obey his order until every weapon clanked to the floor, then he swept his gaze over the women. Their clothing confirmed what he’d known the moment he entered the hall. Blackadder’s widow was not in the room. “Where is she?” he demanded of the closest Blackadder man. “Who, m’lord?” the man said, shifting his gaze to the side. “Your mistress!” David picked him up by the front of his tunic and leaned in close. “Tell me now.” “In her bedchamber,” the man squeaked, pointing to an arched doorway. “’Tis up the stairs.” David caught a sudden whiff of urine and dropped the man to the floor in disgust. The wretch had wet himself. “Take him to the dungeon,” he ordered. The coward had given up his mistress far too easily.

From this basis, Boyd sets out to develop a normative view on a design for command and control. As in Patterns of Conflict, he starts with some ‘samples from historical environment’, offering nine citations from nine practitioners, including from himself (see Box 6.1):6 Sun Tzu (around 400 BC) Probe enemy strength to unmask his strengths, weaknesses, patterns of movement and intentions. Shape enemy’s perception of world to manipulate/undermine his plans and actions. Employ Cheng/Ch’I maneuvers to quickly and unexpectedly hurl strength against weaknesses. Bourcet (1764–71) A plan ought to have several branches . . . One should . . . mislead the enemy and make him imagine that the main effort is coming at some other part. And . . . one must be ready to profit by a second or third branch of the plan without giving one’s enemy time to consider it. Napoleon (early 1800s) Strategy is the art of making use of time and space. I am less chary of the latter than the former. Space we can recover, time never. I may lose a battle, but I shall never lose a minute. The whole art of war consists in a well-reasoned and circumspect defensive, followed by rapid and audacious attack. Clausewitz (1832) Friction (which includes the interaction of many factors, such as uncertainty, psychological/moral forces and effects, etc.) impedes activity. Friction is the only concept that more or less corresponds to the factors that distinguish real war from war on paper. In this sense, friction represents the climate or atmosphere of war. Jomini (1836) By free and rapid movements carry bulk of the forces (successively) against fractions of the enemy. N.B. Forrest (1860s) Git thar the fustest with the mostest. Blumentritt (1947) The entire operational and tactical leadership method hinged upon . . . rapid concise assessment of situations, . . . and quick decision and quick execution, on the principle: each minute ahead of the enemy is an advantage. Balck (1980) Emphasis upon creation of implicit connections or bonds based upon trust, not mistrust, that permit wide freedom for subordinates to exercise imagination and initiative – yet harmonize within intent of superior commanders. Benefit: internal simplicity that permits rapid adaptability. Yours truly Operate inside adversary’s observation-orientation-decision-action loops to enmesh adversary in a world of uncertainty, doubt, mistrust, confusion, disorder, fear, panic, chaos . . . and/or fold adversary back inside himself so that he cannot cope with events/efforts as they unfold.

Several years ago I concluded that 80 percent of my professional productivity flowed from three activities: Corporate visioncasting Corporate communication Leadership development

Krishnamoorthy believes that resetting culture is one of the most important skills the organization possesses, noting that GE has done it several times in the past, and will continue in the future.

I hated all of these pursuits, except photography and horseback riding, and little did the organizers know, I was already versed in a variety of social and leadership skills. After these confidence-building challenges, the various units headed off on separate expeditions. As the individual group developed the capacity to face challenges, the instructor would ask his allotted unit to make its own decisions. I was teamed with a group of five older boys between the ages of eighteen and twenty. Our Portuguese-French instructor was a twenty-three-year-old named Jules – the moment I’d set eyes on him, I was enthralled by his handsome ruggedness, and I had made it a point to join his team no matter what it took. Meanwhile, my “gaydar” also detected a half-Chinese and part Hispanic-American teammate called Kim. He, too, was checking out our instructor, and me. I befriended Kim and roomed with him on camping trips. Singapore, being a conservative society, did not condone homosexuality, let alone at this super ‘macho’ outpost. During a swimming sojourn, I decided to pretend to drown to get the instructor to come to my rescue. Sure enough, when I feigned suffocation in the ocean, Jules headed my direction. While swimming to pull me ashore, I reached to brush his groin, as if by accident. I did this several times and felt his growing penis with every touch. By the time he’d pulled me aground, he had sprouted a full erection behind his speedo. When he gave me the kiss of life, I jabbed my tongue into his mouth. Taken aback, he withdrew contact before resuming the revitalization process. This time, he lingered when his mouth was on mine. He played it cool, since our patrol was watching the entire incident. He ordered my teammates back to their respective duties when he carried me to the tent I shared with Kim. Although he knew I was capering with him, no words were exchanged throughout the entire process; neither did he make any attestation that he was aroused by what had transpired. Before leaving the tent, he uttered, “I’ll check in later to make sure you are okay…” He trailed off when Kim entered. My dearest ex, I’m sure you are intrigued to hear the rest of my story. You will… eventually. LOL! For now, I bid you adios, because my significant other is calling me to dinner.☺   Love and hugs. Your loving ex, Young XOXOXO

There are other problems more closely related to the question of culture. The poor fit between large scale and Korea’s familistic tendencies has probably been a net drag on efficiency. The culture has slowed the introduction of professional managers in situations where, in contrast to small-scale Chinese businesses, they are desperately needed. Further, the relatively low-trust character of Korean culture does not allow Korean chaebol to exploit the same economies of scale and scope in their network organization as do the Japanese keiretsu. That is, the chaebol resembles a traditional American conglomerate more than a keiretsu network: it is burdened with a headquarters staff and a centralized decision-making apparatus for the chaebol as a whole. In the early days of Korean industrialization, there may have been some economic rationale to horizontal expansion of the chaebol into unfamiliar lines of business, since this was a means of bringing modern management techniques to a traditional economy. But as the economy matured, the logic behind linking companies in unrelated businesses with no obvious synergies became increasingly questionable. The chaebol’s scale may have given them certain advantages in raising capital and in cross-subsidizing businesses, but one would have to ask whether this represented a net advantage to the Korean economy once the agency and other costs of a centralized organization were deducted from the balance. (In any event, the bulk of chaebol financing has come from the government at administered interest rates.) Chaebol linkages may actually serve to hold back the more competitive member companies by embroiling them in the affairs of slow-growing partners. For example, of all the varied members of the Samsung conglomerate, only Samsung Electronics is a truly powerful global player. Yet that company has been caught up for several years in the group-wide management reorganization that began with the passing of the conglomerate’s leadership from Samsung’s founder to his son in the late 1980s.72 A different class of problems lies in the political and social realms. Wealth is considerably more concentrated in Korea than in Taiwan, and the tensions caused by disparities in wealth are evident in the uneasy history of Korean labor relations. While aggregate growth in the two countries has been similar over the past four decades, the average Taiwanese worker has a higher standard of living than his Korean counterpart. Government officials were not oblivious to the Taiwanese example, and beginning in about 1981 they began to reverse somewhat their previous emphasis on large-scale companies by reducing their subsidies and redirecting them to small- and medium-sized businesses. By this time, however, large corporations had become so entrenched in their market sectors that they became very difficult to dislodge. The culture itself, which might have preferred small family businesses if left to its own devices, had begun to change in subtle ways; as in Japan, a glamour now attached to working in the large business sector, guaranteed it a continuing inflow of Korea’s best and brightest young people.73