Terrible Leadership Quotes

Truly, men often fail to understand their own weaknesses,” I said neutrally, “and their lack of self-knowledge can bring terrible disasters down on their own heads.

And sadly, fairytale kingdoms work poorly. It’s not just that they’re fairytales and thus not terribly real; we’ve seen stranger and more mythical attempts at leadership in our time. The problem is that Fairytales attract Good Faeries, and thus Bad Faeries; Evil Queens; Huntsmen, and, of course, The Grand Vizier. And all of those tend to lead to ruination.

We do not recognize that we are addicted to some negative psychological habit, some terribly self-destructive patterns of thinking...

Humanity would sink into eternal darkness, it would fall into a dull and primitive state, were the Jews to win this war. They are the incarnation of that destructive force that in these terrible years has guided the enemy war leadership in a fight against all that we see as noble, beautiful, and worth keeping. For that reason alone the Jews hate us. They despise our culture and learning, which they perceive as towering over their nomadic worldview. They fear our economic and social standards, which leave no room for their parasitic drives.

Democracy is more vindictive than cabinets, the wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.

Under a bad leadership Serbs are capable of committing the most terrible atrocities; under good leaders we can do great deeds. It's like a field - if it's not cared for, the weeds will take over. But if you tend it, water and feed the seeds, you will read a bountiful harvest. Serbs are lazy, we lack discipline and have no capacity for self-criticism." With Their Backs to the World

Vaunting ambition can be a terrible thing, but if allied to great ability – a protean energy, grand purpose, the gift of oratory, near-perfect recall, superb timing, inspiring leadership – it can bring about extraordinary outcomes.

Much muscle, little mind, makes you strong but terribly blind

Every leader has blood on her hands.

So the German people clamored for order and leadership. But it was as though in the babble of their clamoring, they had summoned the devil himself, for there now rose up from the deep wound in the national psyche something strange and terrible and compelling. The Führer was no mere man or mere politician. He was something terrifying and authoritarian, self-contained and self-justifying, his own father and his own god. He was a symbol who symbolized himself, who had traded his soul for the zeitgeist. Germany wanted to restore its former glory, but the only means available was the debased language of democracy. So on January 30, 1933, the people democratically elected the man who had vowed to destroy the democratic government they hated. Hitler’s election to office destroyed the office.

I’m sure the driver was a great guy and all he wanted was to drive me to my hotel—but he was a complete stranger to me and the truth is that being vigilant isn’t a part-time job, it’s not about being nice to people, it’s about reality. I made a terrible mistake once, believing the monsters that want to hurt us are easily labeled and identified, rather than walking and hiding amongst us. That’s my reality.

In those days, this was years for the sputnik thing, it was customary to downgrade the Russians' science. People who know something about those things didn't make that mistake. But at the level of Time magazine the joke was how they copied everything and claimed it for their own. Well, of course the corollary of that is that it's our bomb they have and that means we were betrayed. After the war our whole foreign policy depended on our having the bomb and the Soviets not having it. It was a terrible miscalculation. It militarized the world. And when they got it the only alternative to admitting our bankruptcy of leadership and national vision was to find conspiracies. It was one or the other.

I’m done being polite about this bullshit. My list of professional insecurities entirely stems from being a young woman. Big plot twist there! As much as I like to execute equality instead of discussing the blaring inequality, the latter is still necessary. Everything, everywhere, is still necessary. The more women who take on leadership positions, the more representation of women in power will affect and shift the deep-rooted misogyny of our culture—perhaps erasing a lot of these inherent and inward concerns. But whether a woman is a boss or not isn’t even what I’m talking about—I’m talking about when she is, because even when she manages to climb up to the top, there’s much more to do, much more to change. When a woman is in charge, there are still unspoken ideas, presumptions, and judgments being thrown up into the invisible, terribly lit air in any office or workplace. And I’m a white woman in a leadership position—I can only speak from my point of view. The challenges that women of color face in the workforce are even greater, the hurdles even higher, the pay gap even wider. The ingrained, unconscious bias is even stronger against them. It’s overwhelming to think about the amount of restructuring and realigning we have to do, mentally and physically, to create equality, but it starts with acknowledging the difference, the problem, over and over.

no longer regarded myself as a simple general,’ Napoleon later said of his victory, ‘but as a man called upon to decide the fate of peoples. It came to me then that I really could become a decisive actor on our national stage. At that point was born the first spark of high ambition.’51 He repeated this to so many different people on so many different occasions throughout his life that Lodi really can be taken as a watershed moment in his career. Vaunting ambition can be a terrible thing, but if allied to great ability – a protean energy, grand purpose, the gift of oratory, near-perfect recall, superb timing, inspiring leadership – it can bring about extraordinary outcomes.

An old Cherokee chief is teaching his grandson about life: “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. “One is evil—he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, self-pity, arrogance, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, self-doubt, and ego. “The other is good—he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, truth, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, compassion and faith. “This same fight is going on inside you—and inside every other person, too.” The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?” The old chief simply replied, “The one you feed.

These are the daily annoyances, the subtle messages of whiteness. But we bear other scars, too. Over and over I have seen white men and women get praise for their gifts and skills while women of color are told only about their potential for leadership. When white people end up being terrible at their jobs, I have seen supervisors move mountains to give them new positions more suited to their talents, while people of color are told to master their positions or be let go. I have been in the room when promises were made to diversify boardrooms, leadership teams, pastoral staff, faculty and staff positions, only to watch committees appoint a white man in the end. It's difficult to express how these incidents accumulate, making you feel undervalued, underappreciated, and ultimately expendable.

Time and again I’ve watched hearts break open, so that true and authentic leaders can emerge. But that process depends on a brave first step: facing the reality of what is and not being deluded by the powerful, seductive dreams of what can be. Of course, this doesn’t mean there’s no role for dreams. We need dreams. But willfully ignoring what is true is not the same as dreaming. It’s delusion; and delusion leads to terrible decisions and, even worse, the destruction of trust. The first act of becoming a leader is to recognize this being so. From that place, we get to recognize what skills we need to develop and who we really are (and are not) as leaders, and to share our truth in a way that creates authentic, powerful relationships—with our peers, colleagues, and families. Grant us leaders who can do this and we just may create institutions that are less violent to the self, our communities, and our planet.

When I rose to the leadership of the USSR and looked into the situation of nuclear disarmament negotiations, I was baffled. Negotiations were taking place, diplomats and military officials were meeting regularly. They gave speeches to each other, hundreds of litres of beverages of various strengths were consumed at receptions, and meanwhile the arms race continued, arsenals increased and nuclear testing carried on. There was a terrible inertia, a vicious cycle it was impossible to escape. In the second half of the 1980s, the political leadership of both the USSR and the USA came to the realization that all of this could not go on indefinitely. I see here a parallel to the motto of perestroika: "We can no longer continue to live this way." Despite all the differences of opinion in my discussions on specific issues with Ronald Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz, we agreed that the nuclear arms race not only had to be stopped, it had to be reversed.

I am sure that the Roman emperors didn’t have prayer to God in their schools. But then, the early Christians didn’t seem to care what Caligula or Claudius or Nero did. How could any emperor stop God? How, in fact, could the demons of hell make headway when God’s people prayed and called upon his name? Impossible! In the New Testament we don’t see Peter or John wringing their hands and saying, “Oh, what are we going to do? Caligula’s bisexual … he wants to appoint his horse to the Roman Senate … what a terrible model of leadership! How are we going to respond to this outrage?” Let’s not play games with ourselves. Let’s not divert attention away from the weak prayer life of our own churches. In Acts 4, when the apostles were unjustly arrested, imprisoned, and threatened, they didn’t call for a protest; they didn’t reach for some political leverage. Instead, they headed to a prayer meeting. Soon the place was vibrating with the power of the Holy Spirit (vv. 23–31).

You shouldn't feel terrible or flattered because of someone's opinion concerning who you truly are. No body knows you more than yourself.

The trouble is that we follow each other terribly.

Practice using these two unique human capacities: first, see yourself going to the office this afternoon, or home tonight, and finding it in a terrible situation. The house is a total disaster. No one has done his or her job; all the commitments made have been unfulfilled. And you’re tired and beat up. Now, imagine yourself responding to that reality in a mature, wise, self-controlled manner. See the effect that has on someone else. You didn’t confess their sins. You started to pitch in. You were cheerful, helpful, pleasant. And your behavior will prick the conscience of others and allow the consequences agreed upon to happen. You just used two unique human capacities: imagination and conscience. You didn’t rely on memory; if you had relied on memory or history, you might have lost your cool, made judgments of other people, and exacerbated conditions. Memory is built into your past responses to the same or similar stimuli. Memory ties you to your past. Imagination points you to your future. Your potential is unlimited, but to potentiate is to actualize your capabilities no matter what the conditions. In the book Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist imprisoned in the death camps of Nazi Germany in World War II, tells how he exercised the power to choose his response to his terrible conditions. One day he was subjected to experiments on his body. And he discovered, “I have the power to choose.” And he looked for meaning. He believed that if you have a meaning (purpose or cause), if you have a why, you can live with any what. The development of his professional life came out of that one insight. He was raised in the Freudian tradition of psychic determinism. He learned it was a lie. It wasn’t based on science. It came from the study of sick people—neurotics and psychotics—not from the study of healthy, creative, effective people. He didn’t go to his memory, he went to his imagination and conscience. You, too, can progress along the continuum from futility and old habits to faith, hope, and inner security through the exercise of conscience and imagination.

Consolidating power and merely delegating responsibilities are sufficient ways to maintain a single community, but they are terrible ways to exponentially reproduce Christian community. Movements occur only when the disempowered are given the freedom and responsibility to lead, along with the accountability to make it happen.

We see such a refreshing mind-set in young David. Do you remember the times when David refused to harm Saul? In 1 Samuel 24 and 26, David had already been anointed as the rightful king of Israel, and King Saul by this point was a murderous, power-hungry lunatic. David had two perfect opportunities to remove Saul from power and claim the throne he had been promised, yet he refused to take matters into his own hands: “The LORD forbid that I should do this thing to my lord, the LORD’s anointed, to put out my hand against him, seeing he is the LORD’s anointed” (24:6). Why does this attitude seem so foreign? Saul was a terrible leader who had actively turned against God, but David somehow had a holy fear of harming those God had placed in authority. Nowadays, if a leader makes a mistake, no matter how small or innocent, we are quick to criticize and move on. Forgiveness is rare and almost nonexistent toward ministers. We flippantly use the strongest language to rant against leadership. I’m not arguing in favor of abusive leaders, nor am I saying that every leader has God’s blessing. All I’m asking is that we show some humility and respect, even to those who don’t deserve it. Let’s be people of grace.

I acknowledge that an executive can rise quickly to the top by brilliant gamesmanship but at some point you have to do the job. And you just might have to do the job when business turns bad and there’s a terrible crisis and your people are looking to you for leadership like baby birds in a nest awaiting their mother’s return with food. What help is Machiavelli then? When there’s no one left to knife, and there’s nothing you stand for, won’t the knives be pointed at you?

When I left the State Department, I was flattered by offers of top positions in major corporations, most of them in the financial world. The monetary rewards were stunning and the work not terribly demanding. I was told I didn’t need to know anything about banking, finance, or exotic financial instruments like hedge funds and derivatives. Experts would be present to help me. One investment bank pressed me hard, repeatedly upping the money and the title. The offers were definitely tempting. I understood the financial and social value of these positions. But my instincts said no. Did they want me for what I could do for them? Or did they want me for the celebrity I could bring them? My instincts said I would mostly be a door opener and a dinner host.

massive pressure was brought to bear on Johnson to mobilize the National Guard to protect the marchers who planned to resume their walk to Montgomery. Pickets surrounded the White House carrying placards designed to shame the president into action: “LBJ, open your eyes, see the sickness of the South, see the horrors of your homeland.” Despite the terrible pressure, Johnson deemed the moment had not yet come. He feared “that a hasty display of federal force at this time would destroy whatever possibilities existed for the passage of voting rights legislation.” As a southerner, he knew well that the sending of federal troops would revive bitter memories of Reconstruction and risk transforming Alabama’s governor George Wallace into a martyr for states’ rights. “We had to have a real victory for the black people,” he insisted, “not a psychological victory for the North.

The first step in breaking organizational culture inertia is simplification. This helps to eliminate the complex routines, processes, and hidden bargains among units that mask waste and inefficiency. Strip out excess layers of administration and halt nonessential operations—sell them off, close them down, spin them off, or outsource the services. Coordinating committees and a myriad of complex initiatives need to be disbanded. The simpler structure will begin to illuminate obsolete units, inefficiency, and simple bad behavior that was hidden from sight by complex overlays of administration and self-interest. After the first round of simplification, it may be necessary to fragment the operating units. This will be the case when units do not need to work in close coordination—when they are basically separable. Such fragmentation breaks political coalitions, cuts the comfort of cross-subsidies, and exposes a larger number of smaller units to leadership’s scrutiny of their operations and performance. After this round of fragmentation, and more simplification, it is necessary to perform a triage. Some units will be closed, some will be repaired, and some will form the nuclei of a new structure. The triage must be based on both performance and culture—you cannot afford to have a high-performing unit with a terrible culture infect the others. The “repair” third of the triaged units must then be put through individual transformation and renewal maneuvers. Changing a unit’s culture means changing its members’ work norms and work-related values. These norms are established, held, and enforced daily by small social groups that take their cue from the group’s high-status member—the alpha. In general, to change the group’s norms, the alpha member must be replaced by someone who expresses different norms and values. All this is speeded along if a challenging goal is set. The purpose of the challenge is not performance per se, but building new work habits and routines within the unit. Once the bulk of operating units are working well, it may then be time to install a new overlay of coordinating mechanisms, reversing some of the fragmentation that was used to break inertia.

When nations break out of institutional patterns condemning them to poverty and manage to embark on a path to economic growth, this is not because their ignorant leaders suddenly have become better informed or less self-interested or because they’ve received advice from better economists. China, for example, is one of the countries that made the switch from economic policies that caused poverty and the starvation of millions to those encouraging economic growth. But, as we will discuss in greater detail later, this did not happen because the Chinese Communist Party finally understood that the collective ownership of agricultural land and industry created terrible economic incentives. Instead, Deng Xiaoping and his allies, who were no less self-interested than their rivals but who had different interests and political objectives, defeated their powerful opponents in the Communist Party and masterminded a political revolution of sorts, radically changing the leadership and direction of the party. Their economic reforms, which created market incentives in agriculture and then subsequently in industry, followed from this political revolution. It was politics that determined the switch from communism and toward market incentives in China, not better advice or a better understanding of how the economy worked. W

Washington isn’t a nest of vipers. Really. It’s a city of mostly well-intentioned people who, like the rest of us, sometimes cut corners out of expedience, self-interest, or, quite possibly, the greater good. It’s a city defined not by its cardinal sins, but by its venal ones. For every bug-eyed backbencher who insists Mexican immigrants are all al-Qaeda sleeper agents, or every slick lobbyist clamoring to sign an energy company that drenched half of Puget Sound in unrefined crude, there are thousands of far more relatable individuals committing much less conspicuous, and more ethically muddled, offenses: the congressman who votes for a discriminatory bill that won’t go anywhere to earn political capital so he or she can defeat their challenger who would bring a much more harmful agenda to Washington; the reporter who holds off on a story about a senator’s special interest fundraiser to stay in the lawmaker’s good graces for a larger piece about malfeasance among congressional leadership; the political staffer who holds their tongue when a colleague cashes out at a lobbying firm because they, too, might one day want to stop working eighty hours a week while making $45,000 a year. All

A man lived by the side of the road and sold hot dogs. He was hard of hearing, so he had no radio. He had trouble with his eyes, so he read no newspapers. But he sold good hot dogs. This man put up signs on the highway advertising his wonderful hot dogs. He stood on the side of the road and cried, “Buy a hot dog, Mister?” And people bought his hot dogs. He increased his meat and bun orders, and he bought a bigger stove to take care of his trade. He made enough money to put his son through college. Unfortunately, the son came home from college an educated pessimist. He said, “Father, haven’t you been listening to the radio? Haven’t you been reading the newspaper? There’s a big recession on. The European situation is terrible, and the domestic situation is worse.” Whereupon the father thought, “Well, my son’s been to college. He reads the paper and he listens to the radio; he ought to know.” So the father cut down his meat and bun orders, took down his signs, and no longer bothered to stand out on the highway to sell his hot dogs. Of course, his sales fell overnight. “You’re right, son,” the father said to the boy. “We certainly are in the middle of a big recession.” Confidence

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

Mrs. Jones had invited a great and well-known violinist to entertain at her afternoon tea. When it was all over, everyone crowded around the musician. “I’ve got to be honest with you,” one of the guests said, “I think your performance was absolutely terrible.” Hearing his criticism, the hostess interposed: “Don’t pay any attention to him. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He only repeats what he hears everyone else say.” I’m

Google’s trucks would pull up to libraries and quietly walk away with boxes of books to be quickly scanned and returned. “If you don’t have a reason to talk about it, why talk about it?” Larry Page would argue, when confronted with pleas to publicly announce the existence of its program. The company’s lead lawyer on this described bluntly the roughshod attitude of his colleagues: “Google’s leadership doesn’t care terribly much about precedent or law.” In this case precedent was the centuries-old protections of intellectual property, and the consequences were a potential devastation of the publishing industry and all the writers who depend on it. In other words, Google had plotted an intellectual heist of historic proportions. What motivated Google in its pursuit? On one level, the answer is clear: To maintain dominance, Google’s search engine must be definitive. Here was a massive store of human knowledge waiting to be stockpiled and searched. On the other hand, there are less obvious motives: When the historian of technology George Dyson visited the Googleplex to give a talk, an engineer casually admitted, “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an AI.” If that’s true, then it’s easier to understand Google’s secrecy. The world’s greatest collection of knowledge was mere grist to train machines, a sacrifice for the singularity. Google is a company without clear boundaries, or rather, a company with ever-expanding boundaries. That’s why it’s chilling to hear Larry Page denounce competition as a wasteful concept and to hear him celebrate cooperation as the way forward. “Being negative is not how we make progress and most important things are not zero sum,” he says. “How exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing?” And it’s even more chilling to hear him contemplate how Google will someday employ more than one million people, a company twenty times larger than it is now. That’s not just a boast about dominating an industry where he faces no true rivals, it’s a boast about dominating something far vaster, a statement of Google’s intent to impose its values and theological convictions on the world.

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.

If they have success, a terrible momentum is set in place—more people are attracted to their leadership, which only inflates their grandiose tendencies. If anyone dares to challenge them, they are more prone than others to go into that deep narcissistic rage. They are hypersensitive. They also like to stir up constant drama as a means to justify their power—they are the only ones who can solve the problems they create. This also gives them more opportunities to be the center of attention. The workplace is never stable under their direction.

Rustin foresaw a terrible chain reaction: black violence, inflamed by militant black leadership, producing a white backlash that would destroy liberalism just when it was poised to produce real change.

At one point when he and a colleague were researching emotional expressions by forming their facial muscles into the shape of a specific emotion, Eckman stumbled upon a starling truth about mind and body. At the end of a day of emulating and practicing the muscular shape of sadness, he realized that he felt very, very sad. His colleague corroborated this, and they began to track their reactions as they spent hours shaping the muscles of their faces into a particular emotion. "We weren't expecting this at all. And it happened to both of us. We felt terrible. What we were generating was sadness, anguish." He experienced the same things with other emotions; his heartbeat increased ten to twelve beats when he shaped his face into the expression of anger, and his hands significantly heated up. What we discovered is that expression alone is sufficient to create marked changes in the autonomic nervous system. If you intentionally make a facial expression, you change your physiology. By making the correct expression, you begin to have the changes in your physiology that accompany the emotion. The face is not simply a means of display, but also a means of activating emotion. In other words, simply putting the face into a smile drives the brain to activity typical of happiness- just as a frown does with sadness." p94

Everything that was once strong and good is now seen as terrible and evil, simply because the woman now holds the baton of leadership in our generation.

From Switzerland in the south, throughout central Europe and Germany, and as far north and west as England, where Henry VIII burned a dozen Anabaptists at the stake, thousands of men and women were subjected to the most terrible persecution. Many of the more moderate leaders who abjured violence were martyred, leaving a gap in the leadership that was often filled by men of little education but much passion.

desert kingdom. Given a less fraught time, Dragon decided, he would have loved to bring his easel in here and set up for a long, satisfying session of painting. The fluted arches, delicate frescoes and screens, and gold-leaf decorated treasure chests certainly created a most royal space. As Azania spoke, he returned his attention to her. “Brother, I wish to congratulate you upon your ascension to the throne of T’nagru, despite the grief and difficulty our kingdom faces at this time.” He inclined his head, weighted down with the great crown – it looked terribly uncomfortable, Dragon decided. A statement regarding the weighty nature of leadership. Everyone knew that this Skartun siege had only been a precursor to a much greater invasion later in the season. One Jabiz out of thirty had tested their mettle, and breached the outer gates of the citadel with a monstrous Bloodworm which still lay on the sand outside the gates. Did flesh rot in such a waterless desert climate? Or would it simply shrivel? Unexpected thirst tickled his gravelly throat. He coughed aside, the sound echoing loudly despite the large crowd gathered for the King’s coronation event. The Princess said, “I am sorry that I cannot make the formal genuflections, but my

Power is good when given to leaders who desire to empower others, but terrible when given to those with the intention to oppress others.

Dear Leader, Lead by example; do not be a better leader outside of your home and a terrible one at home.

Usually, we develop our leadership style by unconsciously copying others, either parents or charismatic public figures (like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk) or (more likely) current or former bosses. It can also be a blend of the aforementioned. The reason is that most of us never formally learnt leadership or management — we simply watched and learned on the job. The problem is that many of us had and still have terrible role models.

Seen in the light of today’s ongoing Middle East conflict, the massacre of the Qureyz in the year 627 seems to set a terrible precedent. Since faith and politics are as inextricably intertwined in today’s Middle East as they were in the seventh century, the arguments given for the massacre in the early Islamic histories are still invoked, alongside the Quran’s evident anger at Medinan Jewish rejection of Muhammad’s prophethood, to justify the ugly twin offspring of theopolitical extremism: Muslim anti-Semitism and Jewish Islamophobia. In the light of Muhammad’s political situation at the time, however, a less emotional analysis may be more to the point. The massacre of the Qureyz was indeed a demonstration of ruthlessness, but they were, in a sense, collateral damage. The real audience for this demonstration was not them but anyone else in Medina who still harbored reservations about Muhammad’s leadership. If there had been any doubt that he was dealing from a position of strength, he had now dispelled it.

secretly dissolved mescaline in coffee or alcohol and began an innocuous conversation with the unsuspecting test subjects. After thirty to sixty minutes a change took place. The alkaloid had passed into the bloodstream via the mucous membrane of the stomach. The experimental subjects who were “opened up” by the drug were now informed that in this special zone where the interrogation was taking place Plötner had direct access to their soul. He suggested they should tell him everything of their own free will or something terrible would happen. The perfidious strategy worked: “When the mescaline took effect, the investigating person could extract even the most intimate secrets from the prisoner if the questions were asked skillfully. They even reported voluntarily on erotic and sexual matters. . . . Mental reservations ceased to exist. Emotions of hatred and revenge could always be brought to light. Tricky questions were not seen through, so that an assumption of guilt could easily be produced from the answer.”39 Plötner could not finish his series of tests. The Americans liberated the camp and confiscated his documents. It was a treasure trove for the U.S. Secret Service. Under the leadership of Charles Savage and the Harvard medic Henry K. Beecher, the experiments were continued under the code name Project Chatter and other rubrics at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Washington, DC.

In August 2008, the website Gawker published an article titled “The 10 Most Terrible Tyrants of Tech.

Don't leave me in charge!" Elliott begged. "You can't trust me! It's a terrible mistake!

One of the toughest but most important lessons I learned from Jocko,” I explained, “is that you should strive to have the same relationship with every boss you ever work for, no matter if they are good or bad. Whether they are an outstanding leader whom you admire, a mediocre leader who needs improvement, or a terrible leader for whom no one on the team has respect, you must strive to form the same relationship with all of them.

Let’s try to get our folks reasoning together and reasoning with Congress and with the Cabinet! Reason with the leadership and with the President!…And you don’t need to start off by saying he is terrible—because he doesn’t think he’s terrible. Start talking about how you believe that he wants to do what’s right and how you believe this is right, and you’ll be surprised how many who want to do what’s right will try to help you.

You can see in the way I have stated this that I reject the idea (which I have heard from both faculty and students here at Dickinson) that there is a real world outside beyond these walls and that what you have here is something else—a place where you prepare for the real world. If I hear you correctly, you have accepted a terrible limitation. This place is just as real as anything its students will ever experience. It is real because the ambiguities are here—as rich an assortment as will be found anywhere.

Africa had free markets and a thriving entrepreneurial culture and tradition centuries before these became the animating ideas of the United States or Western Europe. Timbuktu, the legendary city in northern Mali, was a famous trading post and marketplace as far back as the twelfth century, as vital to the commerce of North and West Africa as ports on the Mediterranean were to Europe and the Levant. In Africa Unchained, George Ayittey offers myriad examples of industrial activity in precolonial Africa, from the indigo-dye cloth trade of fourteenth-century Kano, Nigeria, to the flourishing glass industry of precolonial Benin to the palm oil businesses of southern Nigeria to the Kente cotton trade of the Asante of Ghana in the 1800s: “Profit was never an alien concept to Africa. Throughout its history there have been numerous entrepreneurs. The aim of traders and numerous brokers or middlemen was profit and wealth.”2 The tragedy is what happened next. These skills and traditions were destroyed, damaged, eroded or forced underground, first during centuries of slave wars and colonialism and, later, through decades of corrupt postindependence rule, usually in service to foreign ideologies of socialism or communism. No postcolonial leader in Africa who fought for independence has ever adequately explained why liberation from colonial rule necessarily meant following the ideas and philosophies of Karl Marx, a gray-bearded nineteenth-century German academic who worked out of the British Library and never set foot in Africa. At the same time, neither should we have ever allowed ourselves to become beholden to paternalistic aid organizations that were sending their representatives to build our wells and plant our food for us. Nor, for that matter, should we have relied on the bureaucrats of the Western world telling us how to be proper capitalists or—as is happening now—to Party officials in Beijing telling us what they want in exchange for this or that project. It was this outside influence—starting with colonialism but later from our own terrible and corrupt policies and leaderships—that the stereotype of the lazy, helpless, unimaginative and dependent African developed. The point is that we Africans have to take charge of our own destiny, and to do this we can call on our own unique culture and traditions of innovation, free enterprise and free trade. We are a continent of entrepreneurs.

I recollect one evening he walked into my home in Mumbai having spent the entire day in one of the world’s largest slums, Dharavi. I thought he is going to come and tell me how terrible it was, how grim and dirty. He walked in with the same radiant smile we have seen in all his pictures and he told me what a great market potential and you are not exploiting it.

But most of us have not had much training in waiting—or at least not enough to prepare us to help others wait in times when they feel highly threatened. Richard Rohr calls this waiting place “liminal space”; liminal comes from the Latin word limina, which means threshold. Liminal space, the place of waiting, is a unique spiritual position where human beings hate to be but where the biblical God is always leading them. It is when you have left the tried and true, but have not yet been able to replace it with anything else. It is when you are finally out of the way. It is when you are between your old comfort zone and any possible new answer. If you are not trained in how to hold anxiety, how to live with ambiguity, how to entrust and wait, you will run . . . anything to flee this terrible cloud of unknowing. In solitude we learn to wait on God for our own life so that when our leadership brings us to the place where the only option for us as a people is to wait on God, we believe it all the way down to the bottom of our being. Because we have met God in the waiting place (rather than running away or giving in to panic or deceiving ourselves into thinking things are better than they are), we are able to stand firm and believe God in a way that makes it possible for others to follow suit. It is a sobering thing to ask ourselves this question: Have I learned enough about how to wait on God in my own life to be able to call others to wait when that is what’s truly needed? Have I done enough spiritual journeying to lead people on this part of their journey?

Is RECON another acronym?” asked Mudflap. (RECON is not an acronym. It’s short for reconnaissance, because reconnaissance is a tough word to spell correctly.) “Um,” said Josh. “Yes. Yes, RECON is an acronym. Now—” “What does it stand for?” asked Splinters. Josh sighed. “Well . . . it . . . stands for . . .” Josh stared at the ceiling of his barracks. He felt instinctively that this was an important test of his leadership. Josh firmly believed that good leaders never admit when they don’t know something. And the fact was, Josh didn’t know what this acronym stood for. (Again, it wasn’t an acronym.) He began to blush a pale plum color. This was a tough spot. What could he do? “RECON stands for . . . Really . . .” He was off to a good start! “Enormous . . . Counterstrike . . .” O. O. O. “On . . .” Aha! Josh was almost there. He screwed up his eyes and willed all his blood to his brain. Josh’s face darkened and became the shade of a turnip. Just one letter left! His eyes lit up. The word came to him like a gift from his ancestors, inscribed in his mind with the ballpoint pen of principals past. “NIMBUSES!

Gerda has no sense of process. That is what is the matter with Gerda, She wants the result without doing any of the work that goes to make it.  . . . She is angry because we have some money. She feels that it might just as well belong to her. . . . For her, the money might as easily have been attached to her as to us by a movement as simple as that which pastes a label on a trunk. . . . As she has no sense of what goes to bring people love, or friendship, or distinction, or wealth, it seems to her that the whole world is enjoying undeserved benefits; and in a universe where all is arbitrary, it might just as well happen that the injustice was pushed a little further and that all these benefits were taken from other people, leaving them nothing, and transferred to her, giving her everything. Given the premise that the universe is purely arbitrary, that there is no causality at work anywhere, there is nothing absurd in that proposal. This is the conqueror’s point of view. . . . Let us admit it, for a little while the whole of our world may belong to Gerda. She will snatch it out of hands too well bred and compassionate and astonished to defend it. What we must remember is that she will not be able to keep it. For her contempt for the process makes her unable to conduct any process. . . . To go up in an aeroplane and drop bombs is a simple use of an elaborate process that has already been developed. But you cannot administer a country on this principle. . . . Gerda’s empire . . . will be an object of fear and nothing else. For this reason, I believe that Gerda’s empire cannot last long. But while it lasts it will be terrible. And what it leaves when it passes will also be terrible. For we cannot hope for anything but a succession of struggles for leadership among men whose minds will have been unfitted for leadership by the existence of tyranny and the rupture of European tradition, until, slowly and painfully, the nations re-emerge, civilization re-emerges.