Succeeding Leadership Quotes

The Paradoxical Commandments People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered. Love them anyway. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway. If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway. The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds. Think big anyway. People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs. Fight for a few underdogs anyway. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway. People really need help but may attack you if you do help them. Help people anyway. Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you have anyway.

Remember that what gets talked about and how it gets talked about determines what will happen. Or won't happen. And that we succeed or fail, gradually then suddenly, one conversation at a time.

Who succeeds in forming and leading a Great Group? He or she is almost always a pragmatic dreamer. They are people who get things done, but they are people with immortal longings. Often, they are scientifically minded people with poetry in their souls.

Leaders Who Attract Followers . . . Need to Be Needed Leaders Who Develop Leaders . . . Want to Be Succeeded

You can succeed beyond the past, but not beyond your belief

Seven Ways To Get Ahead in Business: 1. Be forward thinking 2. Be inventive, and daring 3. Do the right thing 4. Be honest and straight forward 5. Be willing to change, to learn, to grow 6. Work hard and be yourself 7. Lead by example

In today's constantly evolving economy, business models cannot be static. The business model of each business must be consistently changing and evolving in order to stay relevant and to succeed.

Lying makes a probem part of the future; truth makes a problem part of the past.

I believe that positive energy and optimism help us to take up any challenge in life and to succeed in even the most difficult tasks. I also believe that positive energy is contagious: we can transmit it to others.

As a board, you want to be able to identify exactly what the company is succeeding at and exactly what it's failing at so that you can amplify the successes and correct the failures with surgical precision.

Good communication has just a little to do with eloquence. It's character that makes it more successful. Harsh words nicely articulated are sharp enough to kill your brand!

Business and politics are antithetical. If you wanna succeed in one, stay out of the other.

With public sentiment, nothing can fail,” Abraham Lincoln said, “without it nothing can succeed.” Such a leader is inseparably linked to the people. Such leadership is a mirror in which the people see their collective reflection.

The beauty of life is not to live without facing trials, challenges, and difficult times. It is the ability to remain steady, secure, fixed, stable, strong, and unwavering that makes the difference.

All the failures in my life freed me from all my fears so that I can succeed.

believe leadership is servanthood. It’s my responsibility to make sure my people have what they need to succeed and get their work done.

The ability to succeed is not what makes someone a leader. Exhibiting the qualities of leadership is what makes someone an effective leader. Qualities like honesty, integrity, courage, resiliency, perseverance, judgment and decisiveness,

People leave companies for two reasons. One, they don't feel appreciated. And two, they don't get along with their boss.

A boss in essence is every woman willing to try, push, succeed, fail but ultimately do the work in her lifescape to make her mark on the world the way she wants to draw it.

Read to lead in order to succeed.

To survive and succeed in exercising leadership, you must work as closely with your opponents as you do with your supporters.

Many have came before you and many will come after you, but none will ever be you. Some may even try to duplicate your characteristics, but they'll never succeed because you are unique.

Leaders see everything with a leadership bias. Their focus is on mobilizing people and leveraging resources to achieve their goals rather than on using their own individual efforts. Leaders who want to succeed maximize every asset and resource they have for the benefit of their organization. For that reason, they are continually aware of what they have at their disposal.

You must understand something, George. The world's leaders create catastrophes and resolve them-- all at their own whimsy-- every single day. It is how the world runs. Lacking anything else to believe in, common people need to believe in their leaders' abilities to save them. It's true! Their emotional well-being-- and yes, their fate-- depends on the intelligence and skill of those who manipulate the days' disasters. And it should go without saying that the one who succeeds in taking the reins of leadership-- by whatever means-- is the most intelligent and skillful, and therefore most qualified to lead.

A responsible woman doesn’t see opportunities and needs and look the other way pretending not to see them rather she gets to work to ensure things are done properly and her man succeeds in his endeavours.

If you wish to be thought a good estate manager, or a good horseman, or a good physician, or a good flute player without really being one, just imagine all the tricks you have to invent just to keep up appearances. You might succeed at first, but in the end you’re going to be exposed as an impostor.

The U.S. Navy SEAL Teams were at the forefront of this leadership transformation, emerging from the triumphs and tragedies of war with a crystallized understanding of what it takes to succeed in the most challenging environments that combat presents.

Succeeding in life and business is like falling in love with your wife (for those of you that are married). You can’t leave your wife at the mercy of another man and feel safe.

You can't succeed in any endeavor if your motive is solely selfish- feeding your ego, seeking recognition, fame, etc. Find a lasting motivation...

Be Courageous: Succeed or Fail Monumentally!

The people who dare to dream, and dare to pursue their dreams, are the real change-makers. Whether they failed or succeeded, at least, they pursued what they believed in.

Stagnation floods the mind with thoughts of failure and slowly drowns the will to succeed; always move forward.

Aspiring female leaders risk being liked but not respected, or respected but not liked, in settings that may require individuals to be both in order to succeed.

You will have more regrets for the things you didn't try than the ones you tried and didn't succeed at.

Like other aspiring autocrats, Donald Trump cannot succeed alone. He depends upon enablers and collaborators. Every American should understand what his enablers in Congress and in the leadership of the Republican Party were willing to do to help Trump seize power in the months after he lost the 2020 presidential election—and what they continue to do to this day.

It may sound strange, but throughout my five months working under Donald Trump, I wanted him to succeed as president. That’s not a political bias. Had Hillary Clinton been elected, I would have wanted her to succeed as president. I think that’s what it means to love your country. We need our presidents to succeed.

Leadership is like a fountain. Imagine the leaders are the water near the top, ready to burst out of the fountain. The water about to burst out is being pushed up by water below it. If you want to succeed, find leaders who are doing amazing things in the world, and push them up. Find powerful people and help them reach their goals. If you’re of service to them, they will be of service back.

Military leadership is a journey, not a destination. It is continually challenged, and must continually prove it self anew against fresh obstacles. Sometimes those obstacles are external events. Other times they are the doubts of those being led. Still other times they are a result of the leaders's own failures and shortcomings. Political power and influence are different. Once certain levels have been reached, there is no need to prove leadership or competence. A person with such power is accustomed to having every word carefully considere, and every whim treated as an order. And all who recognize that power know to bow to it. A few have the courage or the foolishness to resist. Some succeed in standing firm against the storm. More often, they find their paths yet again turned form their hopes for goal.

It is truth, in the old saying, that is 'the daughter of time,' and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandizing two much larger ones. He seems to have used crisis after crisis as an excuse to extend his own power. His petulant refusal to relinquish the leadership was the despair of postwar British Conservatives; in my opinion this refusal had to do with his yearning to accomplish something that 'history' had so far denied him—the winning of a democratic election.

leadership is the single greatest factor in any team’s performance. Whether a team succeeds or fails is all up to the leader. The leader’s attitude sets the tone for the entire team. The leader drives performance—or doesn’t. And this applies not just to the most senior leader of an overall team, but to the junior leaders of teams within the team.

Yes. Oh no! I don't subject myself to a leadership that does not break new territories! It is the job of leadership to succeed in landing its limbs on new grounds.

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

Stubbornness pays! We tend to think that it doesn’t, we might be hesitant to be stubborn – however only the stubborn succeed.

A quiet room, or a room led by a teacher, doesn’t promote student leadership, but an active, collaborative classroom does!

Leaders do not die with their music on their tongues unsung. They provide services that make them unleash their God-given potentials!

The essence of our industry is to be able to present something to somebody in the most concise form and in the quickest way possible.

No one can make you successful, the will to succeed comes from within

Generous leaders have faith in others to succeed. In turn, they receive tenfold loyalty, commitment, and a positive outcome.

You can’t work with people you hate and succeed. At least, you won’t get the optimum of what you would have obtained when you work with people you love.

Driving your own growth by helping others succeed - what a great feeling.

Leaders are called to Lead to Next.

The mark of a good leader is to prepare those who will succeed you.

If you want to succeed, take calculated risks and be willing to step outside of your comfort zone.

Leaders do not play a "what if game". They believe it will be and work it to be! Success is scarce because fear is common.

I did not know of any single soul who succeed in life without a mentorship.

Leaders succeed or fail depending on whether or not they clarify role expectations and keep their promises.

Our ability to engage in passionate, unfiltered debate about what we need to do to succeed will determine our future as much as any products we develop or partnerships we sign.” It

With public sentiment, nothing can fail,” Abraham Lincoln said, “without it nothing can succeed.

Growing your leadership capacity demands personal effectiveness. Being effective is the ability to do the right thing at all times, no matter the cost.

With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.

What most new entrepreneurs don’t realize is that before you can lead a business, or a family, or a ministry, or even just another person, you have to be the leader of yourself, first.

Different social media networks are used for different communication to the extent that the written word still prevails over visuals. However, in the future, it will be other way around.

The fact that a seed is viable is not a proof that it’s going to bear good fruits. Some good seeds are destroyed by bad soils. So is leadership; everyone was born to lead, but not all become leaders!

A true leader is someone who puts the needs and interests of their team or organisation before their own and strives to create a positive and empowering environment where everyone can thrive and succeed.

A SEAL mentor of mine,  Captain Jim O’Connell, used to say that a way to “gut check” for leadership integrity was to ask if you’d be thrilled to read about you’re pending action in the next edition of the New York Times.

Currently our society tends to churn out individuals that tend to ask the system, “What are you going to give or do for me?” We see this attitude all around us. Self-serving individuals concerned with their personal comfort and welfare beyond the norm. These individuals expect the system to take care of them at all costs. When I run across one of these individuals, it makes me want to puke. This attitude is damn near a form of communism.

I began looking for these four: Smart. It doesn’t mean high IQ (although that’s great), it means disposed toward learning. If there’s a best practice anywhere, adopt it. We want to turn as much as possible into a routine so we can focus on the few things that require human intelligence and creativity. A good interview question for this is: “Tell me about the last significant thing you learned about how to do your job better.” Or you might ask a candidate: “What’s something that you’ve automated? What’s a process you’ve had to tear down at a company?” Humble. I don’t mean meek or unambitious, I mean being humble in the way that Steph Curry is humble. If you’re humble, people want you to succeed. If you’re selfish, they want you to fail. It also gives you the capacity for self-awareness, so you can actually learn and be smart. Humility is foundational like that. It is also essential for the kind of collaboration we want at Slack. Hardworking. It does not mean long hours. You can go home and take care of your family, but when you’re here, you’re disciplined, professional, and focused. You should also be competitive, determined, resourceful, resilient, and gritty. Take this job as an opportunity to do the best work of your life. Collaborative. It’s not submissive, not deferential—in fact it’s kind of the opposite. In our culture, being collaborative means providing leadership from everywhere. I’m taking responsibility for the health of this meeting. If there’s a lack of trust, I’m going to address that. If the goals are unclear, I’m going to deal with that. We’re all interested in getting better and everyone should take responsibility for that. If everyone’s collaborative in that sense, the responsibility for team performance is shared. Collaborative people know that success is limited by the worst performers, so they are either going to elevate them or have a serious conversation. This one is easy to corroborate with references, and in an interview you can ask, “Tell me about a situation in your last company where something was substandard and you helped to fix it.

Each one of us has a unique spot in this harmonious and self-sustaining universe. If our desire is to succeed and enjoy life to the full both personally, professionally, and business wise, we should spot our unique place in the universe.

By war’s end Eisenhower had not only masterfully completed the acquisition and deployment of his chosen leadership techniques but succeeded in projecting their appeal to wide segments of the American public. Both political parties sought him as a presidential candidate.

Leadership was not only about taking charge, it was also about giving your team everything they needed to succeed, and then getting out of their way. It meant knowing when you should be the first person charging through a door and when you should stand down and let someone else do it. Harvath

This is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you blood, property, life, and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you.

I have never bought into the bullshit theory of acceptable losses. We have the technology, the talent, the aggressiveness, and the expertise to bring more of our warriors home than ever before. Our combat, military, and political leaders choose to be mediocre at their jobs. That is as simple as I can put it.

If integrity is considered a virtue, it may be because most people lack integrity. Also, as only a few succeed in their pursuits, some may link failure with a lack of integrity. But this is not fully true. When you reason it out, you might conclude that honest people are more likely to fail and the dishonest rise faster.

The majority of tragically fallen Christian leaders during the past ten to fifteen years have been baby boomers who felt driven to achieve and succeed in an increasingly competitive and demanding church environment. Most often their ambition has been a subtle and dangerous combination of their own dysfunctional personal needs and a certain measure of altruistic desire to expand the kingdom of God. However, because ambition is easily disguised in Christian circles and couched in spiritual language (the need to fulfill the Great Commission and expand the church), the dysfunctions that drive Christian leaders often go undetected and unchallenged until it is too late.

But ultimately, all this work to become indispensable comes back to you. Indispensable employees know that the workplace is simply an arena for their own development as people. They measure their worth not by how indispensable their organizations judge them to be but by how fully they live out the full potential of who they truly are.

Although I play an important part in the facilitation of these lessons, the students take ownership of the problem-solving and reflection portions and display great leadership skills while collaborating with one another. Students rave about how much fun each experience is, and I’m meeting all of my objectives, Essential Questions, and Common Core standards along the way!

[A] people needs to understand what freedom is. We Americans are fortunate that the Founders and their generation possessed that understanding. They knew that freedom, per se, is not enough. They knew that freedom must be limited to be preserved. This paradox is difficult for many students to grasp. Young people generally think freedom means authority figures leaving them alone so they can "do their own thing." That's part of what it means to be free, but true freedom involves much, much more. As understood by our Founders and by the best minds of the young republic, true freedom is always conditioned by morality. John Adams wrote, "I would define liberty as a power to do as we would be done by." In other words, freedom is not the power to do what one can, but what one ought. Duty always accompanies liberty. Tocqueville similarly observed, "No free communities ever existed without morals." The best minds concur: there must be borders: freedom must be limited to be preserved. What kinds of limits are we talking about? * The moral limits of right and wrong, which we did not invent but owe largely to our Judeo-Christian heritage. * Intellectual limits imposed by sound reasoning. Again, we did not invent these but are in debt largely to Greco-Roman civilization, from the pre-Socratic philosophers forward. * Political limits such as the rule of law, inalienable rights, and representative institutions, which we inherited primarily from the British. * Legal limits of the natural and common law, which we also owe to our Western heritage. * Certain social limits, which are extremely important to the survival of freedom. These are the habits of our hearts--good manners, kindness, decency, and willingness to put others first, among other things--which are learned in our homes and places of worship, at school and in team sports, and in other social settings. All these limits complement each other and make a good society possible. But they cannot be taken for granted. It takes intellectual and moral leadership to make the case that such limits are important. Our Founders did that. To an exceptional degree, their words tutored succeeding generations in the ways of liberty. It is to America's everlasting credit that our Founders got freedom right.

But without a team—a group of individuals working to accomplish a mission—there can be no leadership. The only meaningful measure for a leader is whether the team succeeds or fails. For all the definitions, descriptions, and characterizations of leaders, there are only two that matter: effective and ineffective. Effective leaders lead successful teams that accomplish their mission and win. Ineffective leaders do not. The

Thus, by 1888 it had become evident that a national cooperative movement could not succeed in America, at least not in the absence of sustained, massive and violent attack on the wage-system, far more massive and well-organized than the Knights’ movement had been. As Henry Sharpe said, what they were doing was not realistic. Small workshops with little capital and obsolete machinery in an age of rapid industrialization; insufficient institution-building to give financial and material support to co-ops; enslavement to the market at a time when competitors would stop at nothing to suppress working-class moves toward independence. Especially with the weak leadership of Terence Powderly and the mass desertion of former Knights after 1886, as they lost strike after strike, the great dream of building a national cooperative economy was effectively over.

The purpose of today’s civil-rights establishment is not to seek justice, but to seek power for blacks in American life based on the presumption that they are still, in a thousand subtle ways, victimized by white racism,” wrote Shelby Steele of the Hoover Institution in the aftermath of the Zimmerman verdict. The civil-rights leadership rallied to Trayvon’s cause (and not to the cause of those hundreds of black kids slain in America’s inner cities this very year) to keep alive a certain cultural “truth” that is the sole source of the leadership’s dwindling power. Put bluntly, this leadership rather easily tolerates black kids killing other black kids. But it cannot abide a white person (and Mr. Zimmerman, with his Hispanic background, was pushed into a white identity by the media over his objections) getting away with killing a black person without undermining the leadership’s very reason for being.33

The term “escalation of commitment” was first coined by Barry Staw, a business professor at the University of California, Berkeley.4 It’s defined as a decision-making pattern in which a person—for our purposes, a business leader—continues to support or believe in a strategy even after it has continually failed. Escalation of commitment is often described as the inability to let go, or as an obsessive need to try to succeed even when failure is inevitable.

You can tell your organization confers a sense of psychological safety if employees at all levels across the organization regularly exchange ideas and debate their merits. A healthy team is one that trusts each other enough to share and dissect ideas. They may disagree passionately sometimes, but they don’t attack or criticize each other. Instead, they question ideas—even if those ideas come from leadership. They are free to explore and experiment to find what works best.

declaring that he had made Virginia, under his leadership, “a misery, a ruine, a death, a hell.”18 The real hell was yet to come. In the winter of 1609–10, five hundred colonists, having failed to farm or fish or hunt and having succeeded at little except making their neighbors into enemies, were reduced to sixty. “Many, through extreme hunger, have run out of their naked beds being so lean that they looked like anatomies, crying out, we are starved, we are starved,” wrote the

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

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

Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant” (Mark 10:44). By the way, it is dreadful to see this recommended as only another technique for succeeding in leadership. Jesus wasn’t giving techniques for successful leadership. He was telling us who the great person is. He or she is the one who is servant of all. Being a servant shifts one’s relationship to everyone. What do you think it would do to sexual temptation if you thought of yourself as a servant? What do you think it would do to covetousness? What do you think it would do to the feeling of resentment because you didn’t get what you thought you deserved? I’ll tell you. It will lift the burden.

There are two opposing conceptions concerning lies. The first is attributed to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who is reputed to have said, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” There is another one, attributed to US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who said: “Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.” It is clear that the Russian leadership has a preference for Lenin’s approach. Even faced with unequivocal evidence it continues to deny the facts. Apart from unfounded accusations against Georgia of genocide and the denial of its own use of cluster bombs, the war in Georgia was preceded and accompanied by open lies, misinformation (for instance, about “uncontrollable” South Ossetian militias), and active disinformation, all reminiscent of the old Soviet style. In this way Russia almost succeeded in hiding the most important fact: that this was not a “Russian-Georgian war,” but a Russian war against Georgia in Georgia. There was not a single Georgian soldier that crossed the Russian frontier at any point. The Georgian troops that went into South Ossetia did not cross international frontiers, but intervened in their own country, no different from Russian troops intervening in Chechnya. It was Russian and not Georgian troops that crossed the border of another, sovereign country, in breach of the principles of international law [230―31].

You can manage people or you can lead people. You can be good at managing people, or you can be great at leading people. But if you can’t do either of these things very well, then you should probably start working somewhere else. People aren’t always motivated by money. They’re motivated by relationships, by personal fulfillment, by status. The leadership skills of some people mean nothing, because those people don’t know how to connect with others. In the real world, the best leaders are great at both managing people and leading people. They have people around them who they can trust, and they trust them to do the right thing. They inspire, and they listen. They show their followers that they care, and that they want to see them succeed.

Anyone who’s ever been in a leadership role quickly learns that you’re squeezed between others’ lofty expectations and your own personal limitations. You realize that while others want you to be of impeccable character, you’re not always without fault. You learn that you can’t see around every corner, and even if you know your way forward everyone may not end up at the same destination, let alone be on time. You discover that despite your best efforts to introduce brilliant innovations, most of them don’t succeed. You find that you sometimes get angry and short, and that you don’t always listen carefully to what others have to say. You’re reminded that you don’t always treat everyone with dignity and respect. You recognize that others deserve more credit than they get, and that you’ve failed to say thank you. You know that sometimes you get, and accept, more credit than you deserve. In other words, you realize that you’re human.

And in a major speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, Hitler uttered an unmistakable threat to any Jews who did choose to remain behind in his Germany:    I have very often been a prophet in my lifetime and I have usually been laughed at for it. During my struggle for power, it was primarily the Jewish people who just laughed when they heard me prophesy that one day I would become head of state and thereby assume the leadership of the entire people, and that I would then among other things subject the Jewish problem to a solution. I expect that the howls of laughter that rose then from the throats of German Jewry have by now died to a croak.      Today I'm going to turn prophet yet again: if international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed once more in plunging our peoples into a world war, then the outcome will not be a Bolshevization of the world and therewith the victory of Jewry, but the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe! When

David Brooks, “Our Founding Yuppie,” Weekly Standard, Oct. 23, 2000, 31. The word “meritocracy” is an argument-starter, and I have employed it sparingly in this book. It is often used loosely to denote a vision of social mobility based on merit and diligence, like Franklin’s. The word was coined by British social thinker Michael Young (later to become, somewhat ironically, Lord Young of Darlington) in his 1958 book The Rise of the Meritocracy (New York: Viking Press) as a dismissive term to satirize a society that misguidedly created a new elite class based on the “narrow band of values” of IQ and educational credentials. The Harvard philosopher John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 106, used it more broadly to mean a “social order [that] follows the principle of careers open to talents.” The best description of the idea is in Nicholas Lemann’s The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), a history of educational aptitude tests and their effect on American society. In Franklin’s time, Enlightenment thinkers (such as Jefferson in his proposals for creating the University of Virginia) advocated replacing the hereditary aristocracy with a “natural aristocracy,” whose members would be plucked from the masses at an early age based on “virtues and talents” and groomed for leadership. Franklin’s idea was more expansive. He believed in encouraging and providing opportunities for all people to succeed as best they could based on their diligence, hard work, virtue, and talent. As we shall see, his proposals for what became the University of Pennsylvania (in contrast to Jefferson’s for the University of Virginia) were aimed not at filtering a new elite but at encouraging and enriching all “aspiring” young men. Franklin was propounding a more egalitarian and democratic approach than Jefferson by proposing a system that would, as Rawls (p. 107) would later prescribe, assure that “resources for education are not to be allotted solely or necessarily mainly according to their return as estimated in productive trained abilities, but also according to their worth in enriching the personal and social life of citizens.” (Translation: He cared not simply about making society as a whole more productive, but also about making each individual more enriched.)

Chronic anxiety is systemic; it is deeper and more embracing than community nervousness. Rather than something that resides within the psyche of each one, it is something that can envelope, if not actually connect, people. It is a regressive emotional process that is quite different from the more familiar, acute anxiety we experience over specific concerns. Its expression is not dependent on time or events, even though specific happenings could seem to trigger it, and it has a way of reinforcing its own momentum. Chronic anxiety might be compared to the volatile atmosphere of a room filled with gas fumes, where any sparking incident could set off a conflagration, and where people would then blame the person who struck the match rather trying to disperse the fumes. The issues over which chronically anxious systems become concerned, therefore, are more likely to be the focus of their anxiety rather than its cause. This is why, for example, counselors, educators, and consultants who offer technical solutions for how to manage whatever brought the family in—conflict, money, parents, children, aging, sex—will rarely succeed in changing that family in any fundamental way. The anxiety that drives the problem simply switches to another focus. Assuming that what a family is worried about is what is “causing” its anxiety is tantamount to blaming a blown-away tree or house for attracting the tornado that uprooted it. As

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!

I am passionate about... Doing the impossible, taking on big challenges Creating new structures to achieve big results Solving problems, removing obstacles Getting the best out of people I really like ... Working with very bright people who have good values Working with companies that are respected or where respect can be created Building a culture that will succeed and be a place where people can grow and enjoy work My greatest contribution is ... Being able to do many different things well Accomplishing the mission, exceeding expectations Building an organization from scratch Saving the day—taking dire situations, fixing them, and turning them into winners I am particularly good at... Taking things that look like failures and making them into exceptional successes Developing people—getting them to be creative, committed, and accountable Getting the job done quickly with practical, interesting solutions I am known for ... Creative leadership Overcoming challenging obstacles Rising to the occasion Seeing the core issues, problems, solutions Getting to the heart of the matter quickly, and intuitively analyzing the situation I have exceptional ability to ... Devise straightforward solutions that are efficient and practical Take complex problems and quickly develop elegant solutions Create solutions that get the job done Exercise: Passions and Gifts (Downloadable) Now it �s your turn. Complete the following sentences. You may list multiple answers for each of the items below. Keep your responses focused on the career and work aspects of your life. I feel passionate about ... What I really like is... My greatest contribution is... I am particularly good at... I am known for... I have an exceptional ability to... Colleagues often ask for my help with... What motivates me most is... I would feel disappointed, frustrated, or sad if I couldn�t do...

Are you an influencer? Are you in media? Do you run a conference? A business? A podcast? Are you a mom in the PTA? Are you a teller at the local bank? Are you a volunteer for Sunday school at church? Are you a high school student? Are you a grandma of seven? Great! I need you. We need you! We need you to live into your purpose. We need you to create and inspire and build and dream. We need you to blaze a trail and then turn around and light the way with your magic so other women can follow behind you. We need you to believe in the idea that every kind of woman deserves a chance to be who she was meant to be, and she may never realize it if you—yes, you—don’t speak that truth into her life. You’ll be able to do that if you first practice the idea of being made for more in your own life. After all, if you don’t see it, how do you know you can be it? If women in your community or your network marketing group or your Zumba class don’t ever see an example of a confident woman, how will they find the courage to be confident? If our daughters don’t see a daily practice of us feeling not only comfortable but truly fulfilled by the choice to be utterly ourselves, how will they learn that behavior? Pursuing your goals for yourself is so important, and I’d argue that it’s an essential factor in living a happy and fulfilled existence—but it’s not enough simply to give you permission to make your dream manifest. I want to challenge you to love the pursuit and openly celebrate who you become along the journey. When your light shines brighter, others won’t be harmed by the glare; they’ll be encouraged to become a more luminescent version of themselves. That’s what leadership looks like. Leaders are encouraging. Leaders share information. Leaders hold up a light to show you the way. Leaders hold your hand when it gets hard. True leaders are just as excited for your success as they are for their own, because they know that when one of us does well, all of us come up. When one of us succeeds, all of us succeed. You’ll be able to lead other women to that place if you truly believe that every woman is worthy and called to something sacred.

me to be honest about his failings as well as his strengths. She is one of the smartest and most grounded people I have ever met. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” she told me early on. “You shouldn’t whitewash it. He’s good at spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I’d like to see that it’s all told truthfully.” I leave it to the reader to assess whether I have succeeded in this mission. I’m sure there are players in this drama who will remember some of the events differently or think that I sometimes got trapped in Jobs’s distortion field. As happened when I wrote a book about Henry Kissinger, which in some ways was good preparation for this project, I found that people had such strong positive and negative emotions about Jobs that the Rashomon effect was often evident. But I’ve done the best I can to balance conflicting accounts fairly and be transparent about the sources I used. This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. This is also, I hope, a book about innovation. At a time when the United States is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build creative digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. He and his colleagues at Apple were able to think differently: They developed not merely modest product advances based on focus groups, but whole new devices and services that consumers did not yet know they needed. He was not a model boss or human being, tidily packaged for emulation. Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and passions and products were all interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

MT: Mimetic desire can only produce evil? RG: No, it can become bad if it stirs up rivalries but it isn't bad in itself, in fact it's very good, and, fortunately, people can no more give it up than they can give up food or sleep. It is to imitation that we owe not only our traditions, without which we would be helpless, but also, paradoxically, all the innovations about which so much is made today. Modern technology and science show this admirably. Study the history of the world economy and you'll see that since the nineteenth century all the countries that, at a given moment, seemed destined never to play anything but a subordinate role, for lack of “creativity,” because of their imitative or, as Montaigne would have said, their “apish” nature, always turned out later on to be more creative than their models. It began with Germany, which, in the nineteenth century, was thought to be at most capable of imitating the English, and this at the precise moment it surpassed them. It continued with the Americans in whom, for a long time, the Europeans saw mediocre gadget-makers who weren't theoretical or cerebral enough to take on a world leadership role. And it happened once more with the Japanese who, after World War II, were still seen as pathetic imitators of Western superiority. It's starting up again, it seems, with Korea, and soon, perhaps, it'll be the Chinese. All of these consecutive mistakes about the creative potential of imitation cannot be due to chance. To make an effective imitator, you have to openly admire the model you're imitating, you have to acknowledge your imitation. You have to explicitly recognize the superiority of those who succeed better than you and set about learning from them. If a businessman sees his competitor making money while he's losing money, he doesn't have time to reinvent his whole production process. He imitates his more fortunate rivals. In business, imitation remains possible today because mimetic vanity is less involved than in the arts, in literature, and in philosophy. In the most spiritual domains, the modern world rejects imitation in favor of originality at all costs. You should never say what others are saying, never paint what others are painting, never think what others are thinking, and so on. Since this is absolutely impossible, there soon emerges a negative imitation that sterilizes everything. Mimetic rivalry cannot flare up without becoming destructive in a great many ways. We can see it today in the so-called soft sciences (which fully deserve the name). More and more often they're obliged to turn their coats inside out and, with great fanfare, announce some new “epistemological rupture” that is supposed to revolutionize the field from top to bottom. This rage for originality has produced a few rare masterpieces and quite a few rather bizarre things in the style of Jacques Lacan's Écrits. Just a few years ago the mimetic escalation had become so insane that it drove everyone to make himself more incomprehensible than his peers. In American universities the imitation of those models has since produced some pretty comical results. But today that lemon has been squeezed completely dry. The principle of originality at all costs leads to paralysis. The more we celebrate “creative and enriching” innovations, the fewer of them there are. So-called postmodernism is even more sterile than modernism, and, as its name suggests, also totally dependent on it. For two thousand years the arts have been imitative, and it's only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that people started refusing to be mimetic. Why? Because we're more mimetic than ever. Rivalry plays a role such that we strive vainly to exorcise imitation. MT

The truth to succeeding at leadership is recognizing that it’s a never-ending journey of discovery and learning.

Striving for balance forces a leader to invest time and energy in aspects of leadership where he will never succeed. It is not realistic to strive for balance within the sphere of our personal leadership abilities. …discover your zone and stay there. Then delegate everything else.

During the nineteenth century, corps commander was the highest level of command to still require skills of an operator for success. A corps commander was still able to see a problem develop and to dispatch soldiers or artillery to solve it on the spot. But at the army level of command the dynamics were for the first time different. The army commander was much more distant from the battle and consequently had no ability to act immediately or to control soldiers he could not see. The distance of the army commander from the action slowed responses to orders and created friction such that the commander was obliged to make decisions before the enemy’s actions were observed. Civil War army commanders were now suddenly required to exhibit a different set of skills. For the first time, they had to think in time and to command the formation by inculcating their intent in the minds of subordinates with whom they could not communicate directly. Very few of the generals were able to make the transition from direct to indirect leadership, particularly in the heat of combat. Most were very talented men who simply were never given the opportunity to learn to lead indirectly. Some, like Generals Meade and Burnside, found themselves forced to make the transition in the midst of battle. General Lee succeeded in part because, as military advisor to Jefferson Davis, he had been able to watch the war firsthand and to form his leadership style before he took command. General Grant was particularly fortunate to have the luck of learning his craft in the Western theater, where the press and the politicians were more distant, and their absence allowed him more time to learn from his mistakes. From the battle of Shiloh to that of Vicksburg, Grant as largely left alone to learn the art of indirect leadership through trial and error and periodic failure without getting fired for his mistakes. The implications of this phase of military history for the future development of close-combat leaders are at once simple, and self-evident. As the battlefield of the future expands and the battle becomes more chaotic and complex, the line that divides the indirect leader from the direct leader will continue to shift lower down the levels of command. The circumstances of future wars will demand that much younger and less experienced officers be able to practice indirect command. The space that held two Civil War armies of 200,000 men in 1863 would have been controlled by fewer than 1,000 in Desert Storm, and it may well be only a company or platoon position occupied by fewer than 100 soldiers in a decade or two. This means younger commanders will have to command soldiers they cannot see and make decisions without the senior leader’s hand directly on their shoulders. Distance between all the elements that provide support, such as fires and logistics, will demand that young commanders develop the skill to anticipate and think in time. Tomorrow’s tacticians will have to think at the operational level of war. They will have to make the transition from “doers” to thinkers, from commanders who react to what they see to leaders who anticipate what they will see. To do all this to the exacting standard imposed by future wars, the new leaders must learn the art of commanding by intent very early in their stewardship. The concept of “intent” forms the very essence of decentralized command.