Worse Leadership Quotes

The day you are not solving problems or are not up to your butt in problems is probably a day you are no longer leading. If your desk is clean and no one is bringing you problems, you should be very worried. It means that people don't think you can solve them or don't want to hear about them. Or, far worse, it means they don't think you care.

When people don't know what’s going on, it’s human nature for them to imagine a version that’s ten times worse than the truth!

Self-deception is like this. It blinds us to the true causes of problems, and once we’re blind, all the “solutions” we can think of will actually make matters worse. Whether at work or at home, self-deception obscures the truth about ourselves, corrupts our view of others and our circumstances, and inhibits our ability to make wise and helpful decisions.

Every day we get better, or we get worse.

Over the years the Indian leadership, and the educated Indian, have deliberately projected and embellished an image about Indians that they know to be untrue, and have wilfully encouraged the well-meaning but credulous foreign observer to accept it. What is worse, they have fallen in love with this image, and can no longer accept that it is untrue.

The reality for teachers is we don’t know if we’ve been successful or not. It takes years to see how a kid turns out, and it’s impossible to know what role we’ve played, for better or worse. It’s why so many teachers burn out—our successes are limited and rarely celebrated, but our failures are always out there for everyone to see and judge.

Success means: I want to know the work I do means something to somebody and helps make the world, if not a Better place, not a worse one.

When an organization does worse immediately after the departure of a leader, what does this say about that person’s leadership?

For better of for worse the church in the West bought modernity's claims. We were baptized in its story (even though it said it did not have one) and accepted its categories and definitions. But somewhere along the way we also began to believe that the ways in which we accessed knowledge about God or Jesus or the Spirit or Christianity were those things themselves.

What is the next thing you need for leadership? It is the ability to make up your mind to make a decision and accept full responsibility for that decision. Have you ever wondered why people do not make a decision? The answer is quite simple. It is because they lack professional competence, or they are worried that their decision may be wrong and they will have to carry the can. Ladies and Gentlemen, according to the law of averages, if you take ten decisions, five ought to be right. If you have professional knowledge and professional competence, nine will be right, and the one that might not be correct will probably be put right by a subordinate officer or a colleague. But if you do not take a decision, you are doing something wrong. An act of omission is much worse than an act of commission. An act of commission can be put right. An act of omission cannot.

Fearful leaders side-step issues instead of dealing with them, cover up mistakes instead of owning up to mistakes; they skulk back into the shadows and hope that the crisis—whatever it is—will somehow blow over instead of facing their fears. Worse, they resort to lies and deception to cover up the truth.

Years, back, when they first made him a sergeant, he’d imagined the officers much have all the answers. When he was given his commission, he’d imagined the generals must have all the answers. When King Orso made him a general, he’d imagined the Closed counsel bust have all the answers. Now, as a lord marshal, he finally knew it for an absolute fact. No one had the answers. Worse. There weren’t any.

Since the debt limit simply accommodates debt that has already been incurred, raising it should, in theory, be perfunctory. But politicians have found it a useful shibboleth for showing their fealty fiscal discipline, even as they vote to ratify the debts their previous actions have a beginning the country to pay. The symbol of railing against debt has proven politically beneficial, even if not substantively meaningful.

To admit we are foolish, weak, and in need of repentance gives the vindictive and self-righteous camp plenty of ammunition to turn against us and to turn others against our leadership. But the alternatives to living in and living out truth are far worse: we either hide from truth or we choose to spin our sin and our story.

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision. HELEN KELLER

Humanity can not afford to have 21st Century businesses run on 20th Century science, and (worse) pseudoscience.

There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away. The

There are few things worse in leadership than an overdog with no vision trying to lead underdogs with great vision.

There is no worse course in leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away.

When we take people merely as they are, we make them worse; when we treat them as if they were what they should be, we improve them as fat as they can be improved.

If the paradigm doesn’t work, executing the paradigm better actually makes things worse.

There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away.

Peter Drucker once noted that “no institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under the leadership of perfectly normal human beings.” Warren Buffet made the same point more pithily: “I only invest in companies which any fool can run, because some day some fool will run it.

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

In a poor organization, on the other hand, people spend much of their time fighting organizational boundaries, infighting, and broken processes. They are not even clear on what their jobs are, so there is no way to know if they are getting the job done or not. In the miracle case that they work ridiculous hours and get the job done, they have no idea what it means for the company or their careers. To make it all much worse and rub salt in the wound, when they finally work up the courage to tell management how fucked-up their situation is, management denies there is a problem, then defends the status quo, then ignores the problem.

It had been on my mind ever since allowing myself to call President Trump a "draft-dodging chickenhawk" during on of the DNC forums. While true, that statement was not in keeping which how I publicly speak about political figures, or anyone else, and afterward I reflected that this president was inspiring a loss of decency not just in his supporters but also in those of us who opposed him. It was another way of looking at the moral stakes of politics as it filters through to millions of lives: that we might all be growing into harder and perhaps worse people, as a consequence of political leadership that has failed to call us to our highest values.

In democracies where the citizens may read, hear or say what they like, the leaders are no better and no worse than the followers. So perhaps, if we cannot blame the leaders because the job of peacemaking is a sorry mess, we can only blame ourselves.

A definite pessimist believes the future can be known, but since it will be bleak, he must prepare for it. Perhaps surprisingly, China is probably the most definitely pessimistic place in the world today. When Americans see the Chinese economy grow ferociously fast (10% per year since 2000), we imagine a confident country mastering its future. But that’s because Americans are still optimists, and we project our optimism onto China. From China’s viewpoint, economic growth cannot come fast enough. Every other country is afraid that China is going to take over the world; China is the only country afraid that it won’t. China can grow so fast only because its starting base is so low. The easiest way for China to grow is to relentlessly copy what has already worked in the West. And that’s exactly what it’s doing: executing definite plans by burning ever more coal to build ever more factories and skyscrapers. But with a huge population pushing resource prices higher, there’s no way Chinese living standards can ever actually catch up to those of the richest countries, and the Chinese know it. This is why the Chinese leadership is obsessed with the way in which things threaten to get worse. Every senior Chinese leader experienced famine as a child, so when the Politburo looks to the future, disaster is not an abstraction. The Chinese public, too, knows that winter is coming. Outsiders are fascinated by the great fortunes being made inside China, but they pay less attention to the wealthy Chinese trying hard to get their money out of the country. Poorer Chinese just save everything they can and hope it will be enough. Every class of people in China takes the future deadly seriously.

Prologue: Above the Line Playbook Leadership isn’t a difference maker. It is the difference maker. Leadership is much more than simply declaring what you want and then getting angry if you don’t get it. A leader is someone who earns trust, sets a clear standard, and then equips and inspires people to meet that standard. Be true to who you are. Talk straight and demand accountability. Run toward problems. If you ignore them, they only get worse. Work to get better every day. Staying the same gets you nowhere. Savor the journey. Every day. You only get to do it once.

There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away… people can face peril or misfortune with fortitude and buoyancy, but they bitterly resent being deceived or finding that those responsible for their affairs are themselves dwelling in a fool’s paradise.

Self-deception is like this. It blinds us to the true causes of problems, and once we’re blind, all the “solutions” we can think of will actually make matters worse. Whether at work or at home, self-deception obscures the truth about ourselves, corrupts our view of others and our circumstances, and inhibits our ability to make

There is another issue with the largely cognitive approach to management, which we had big-time at Google. Smart, analytical people, especially ones steeped in computer science and mathematics as we were, will tend to assume that data and other empirical evidence can solve all problems. Quants or techies with this worldview tend to see the inherently messy, emotional tension that’s always present in teams of humans as inconvenient and irrational—an irritant that will surely be resolved in the course of a data-driven decision process. Of course, humans don’t always work that way. Things come up, tensions arise, and they don’t naturally go away. People do their best to avoid talking about these situations, because they’re awkward. Which makes it worse.

Try This Counterintuitive Way To Be Well-Liked: One of the biggest misconceptions about connecting is seeking, first, to be liked. In fact, the counterintuitive way to get someone to like you is in knowing this core truth: If they like the way they feel when around you, they will like you. In fact, they will project onto you the character traits they most like in others, even if you have not yet exhibited them. Conversely, if they do not like the way they act when around you, they will instinctively blame you for it, regardless of the true reason. They will project onto you some of the qualities they most dislike in others. What's worse, they will go out of their way to prove they are right, even in ways that damage their reputation as well as yours.

Whatever your politics, it is wrong to dismiss the damage to the norms and traditions that have guided the presidency and our public life for decades or, in many cases, since the republic was founded. It is also wrong to stand idly by, or worse, to stay silent when you know better, while a president brazenly seeks to undermine public confidence in law enforcement institutions that were established to keep our leaders in check.

You’ve probably also noted the impacts of virtual distraction on your own and others’ behaviors: memory loss, inability to concentrate, being asked to repeat what you just said, miscommunication the norm, getting lost online and wasting time you don’t have, withdrawing from the real world. The list of what’s being lost is a description of our best human capacities—memory, meaning, relating, thinking, learning, caring. There is no denying the damage that’s been done to humans as technology took over—our own Progress Trap. The impact on children’s behavior is of greatest concern for its present and future implications. Dr. Nicolas Kardaras, a highly skilled physician in rehabilitation, is author of Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids—and How to Break the Trance. He describes our children’s behavior in ways that I notice in my younger grandchildren: “We see the aggressive temper tantrums when the devices are taken away and the wandering attention spans when children are not perpetually stimulated by their hyper-arousing devices. Worse, we see children who become bored, apathetic, uninteresting and uninterested when not plugged in.”17 These very disturbing behaviors are not just emotional childish reactions. Our children are behaving as addicts deprived of their drug. Brain imaging studies show that technology stimulates brains just like cocaine does.

Measuring the wrong thing is often worse than measuring nothing, because you do get what you measure. So if the assessments focus on how much people “enjoy” the experience—be that reading a book, watching a talk, or going to a training session—those same books, talks, and trainings will respond to those measurements by prioritizing the wrong outcomes: making participants feel good and giving them a good time. Simply stated, measuring entertainment value produces great entertainment, not change; measuring the wrong things crowds out assessing other, more relevant indicators such as improvements in workplaces. Improvement comes from employing measurements that are appropriate, those that are connected to the areas in which we seek improvement. In the case of leadership, that appropriate measurement would include assessing the frequency of desirable leader behaviors; actual workplace conditions such as engagement, satisfaction, and

The merits of leadership are so ingrained that it’s natural to say, “I’ll take the lead.” Sometimes, though, it may make more sense to take the follow. Leading when you don't know where to go, when you don't have the commitment or the passion, or worst of all, when you can't overcome your fear- that sort of leading is worse than none at all. It takes guts to acknowledge that perhaps this time, right now, you can’t lead. So get out of the way and take the follow instead.

And I was also proud of living up to NASA’s belief that I was capable of commanding the world’s spaceship. On my first day at JSC, I hadn’t been an obvious candidate. I was a pilot. I didn’t have much leadership experience to speak of at all. Worse: I was a Canadian pilot without much leadership experience. Square astronaut, round hole. But somehow, I’d managed to push myself through it, and here was the truly amazing part: along the way, I’d become a good fit. It had only taken 21 years.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER In your organization, are people rewarded for what happens after they transfer? Are they rewarded for the success of their people? Do people want to be “missed” after they leave? When an organization does worse immediately after the departure of a leader, what does this say about that person’s leadership? How does the organization view this situation? How does the perspective of time horizon affect our leadership actions? What can we do to incentivize long-term thinking?

In June 1789 some congressmen wanted Washington to have to gain senatorial approval to fire as well as hire executive officers—the Constitution was silent on the subject; the House duly approved that crippling encroachment on executive authority. When the Senate vote ended in a tie, Vice President Adams cast the deciding vote to defeat the measure, thereby permitting the president to exert true leadership over his cabinet and, for better or worse, preventing the emergence of a parliamentary democracy.

Health outcomes for black people are worse across the board during non-pandemic times. Black women are 22% more likely to die from heart disease than white women and 71% more likely to die from cervical cancer. Blacks are diagnosed with diabetes at a 71% higher rate than whites. Minorities receive lower quality care for their diabetes, resulting in more complications, such as chronic kidney disease and amputations. The list of conditions which Blacks suffer more extend to mental health, cancer, and heart disease.

What plagues the US healthcare system is not universally poor outcomes, but poor outcomes for the bottom rungs of society. Low income populations and racial minorities. As with much inequalities, the factors that result in this outcome feed on one another to make the problem worse. Black Americans are less likely to be able to find a physician who will treat them. The physicians they do find are less likely to give them a needed prescription for pain relief as they are more likely to be seen as drug seekers. They are also less likely to be able to afford the prescriptions they are given, they are more likely to have unaddressed trauma, often multi-generational and childhood trauma.

The popular push to depict Jesus as a Galilean and see Galilee as religiously and ethnically distinct from Judea winds up conveying the impression that “Judaism,” with its Temple and its leadership, is quite distinct from the Galilean Jesus. The popular image of Jesus as a “peasant” often serves not to connect him to his fellow Jews but to distinguish him from them, since “the Jews” remain in the popular imagination not peasants but Pharisees and Sadducees or, in academic terms, members of the retainer and elite classes. Worse, the lingering view that Jesus dismissed basic Jewish practices, such as the Laws concerning Sabbath observance and ritual purity, turns Jesus away from his Jewish identity and makes him into a liberal Protestant.

...The happy Warrior... 'tis he whose law is reason; who depends upon that law as on the best of friends; whence, in a state where men are tempted still to evil for a guard against worse ill, and what in quality or act is best doth seldom on a right foundation rest, he labors good on good to fix, and owes to virtue every triumph that he knows: who, if he rise to station of command, rises by open means; and there will stand on honorable terms, or else retire, and in himself possess his own desire; who comprehends his trust, and to the same keeps faithful with a singleness of aim; and therefore does not stoop, nor lie in wait for wealth, or honors, or for worldly state; whom they must follow; on whose head must fall, like showers of manna, if they come at all:

POLLARD had known better, but instead of pulling rank and insisting that his officers carry out his proposal to sail for the Society Islands, he embraced a more democratic style of command. Modern survival psychologists have determined that this “social”—as opposed to “authoritarian”—form of leadership is ill suited to the early stages of a disaster, when decisions must be made quickly and firmly. Only later, as the ordeal drags on and it is necessary to maintain morale, do social leadership skills become important. Whalemen in the nineteenth century had a clear understanding of these two approaches. The captain was expected to be the authoritarian, what Nantucketers called a fishy man. A fishy man loved to kill whales and lacked the tendency toward self-doubt and self-examination that could get in the way of making a quick decision. To be called “fishy to the backbone” was the ultimate compliment a Nantucketer could receive and meant that he was destined to become, if he wasn’t already, a captain. Mates, however, were expected to temper their fishiness with a more personal, even outgoing, approach. After breaking in the green hands at the onset of the voyage—when they gained their well-deserved reputations as “spit-fires”—mates worked to instill a sense of cooperation among the men. This required them to remain sensitive to the crew’s changeable moods and to keep the lines of communication open. Nantucketers recognized that the positions of captain and first mate required contrasting personalities. Not all mates had the necessary edge to become captains, and there were many future captains who did not have the patience to be successful mates. There was a saying on the island: “[I]t is a pity to spoil a good mate by making him a master.” Pollard’s behavior, after both the knockdown and the whale attack, indicates that he lacked the resolve to overrule his two younger and less experienced officers. In his deference to others, Pollard was conducting himself less like a captain and more like the veteran mate described by the Nantucketer William H. Macy: “[H]e had no lungs to blow his own trumpet, and sometimes distrusted his own powers, though generally found equal to any emergency after it arose. This want of confidence sometimes led him to hesitate, where a more impulsive or less thoughtful man would act at once. In the course of his career he had seen many ‘fishy’ young men lifted over his head.” Shipowners hoped to combine a fishy, hard-driving captain with an approachable and steady mate. But in the labor-starved frenzy of Nantucket in 1819, the Essex had ended up with a captain who had the instincts and soul of a mate, and a mate who had the ambition and fire of a captain. Instead of giving an order and sticking with it, Pollard indulged his matelike tendency to listen to others. This provided Chase—who had no qualms about speaking up—with the opportunity to impose his own will. For better or worse, the men of the Essex were sailing toward a destiny that would be determined, in large part, not by their unassertive captain but by their forceful and fishy mate.

Women retained more information from the training, and those who were trained by them and listened to them did in fact learn more. But most farmers did not listen. They assumed women were less able, and therefore paid less attention to them. Along the same lines, when women in Bangladesh were trained to become line managers, they were just as good as men based on an objective assessment of their leadership and technical qualities, but they were perceived as less good by their line workers. And, presumably as a result, the performance of their lines also suffered, perversely confirming the prejudice that they were worse managers.39 What started as an unjustified preference against women resulted in women actually doing worse through no fault of their own, and this reinforced their inferior status.

And the time was also coming when the great purges, long in blueprint, could no longer be postponed. The whole subject of the slaughter by a revolution of its children is mysterious. But it is clear that the group warfare, by the ‘logic of things,’ had opened into the next stage: the fanatical idealists of the 1880's and 1890's needed to be destroyed by the realists now in control of the Party, their younger fanatics of the apparatus, and their Calibans (a new breed). Some of the original revolutionaries had become disillusioned, and there is nothing worse than an ex-believer. Some were haunted by old romantic notions of ‘freedom,’ and therefore opposed the rough measures needed to forge a modern totalitarian state. Some probably still dreamed they could change the balance, and leadership, of the Party.

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.

It was up to fathers to help boys “find the correct path to masculinity,” and for this reason the father’s role was “more critical now than at any time in history.” In this respect, Farrar agreed with Dobson that “our very survival as a people will depend upon the presence or absence of masculine leadership in millions of homes,” but in the decade since Dobson had characterized the Western world as standing at a “great crossroads in its history,” things hadn’t improved. If anything, they’d gotten worse. As “point man,” the father needed to protect sons from feminization. Boys, he explained, were naturally aggressive due to their higher levels of testosterone; aggression was “part of being male.” Little boys were prone to doing reckless things like jumping off slides and swinging like Tarzan, splitting their heads open on occasion. But this was just part of being a boy. “They will survive the scars and broken bones of boyhood,” Farrar wrote, “but they cannot survive being feminized.

A veritable pacifist when it comes to social guilds or luncheon clubs, I turn into something of a militant on the subject of the only true and living Church on the face of the earth. . . . Setting aside for a time the heavenly host we hope one day to enjoy, I still choose the church of Jesus Christ to fill my need to be needed--here and now, as well as there and then. When public problems or private heartaches come--as surely they do come--I will be most fortunate if in that hour I find myself in the company of Latter-day Saints. . . . When asked "What can I know?" a Latter-day Saint answers, "All that God knows." When asked "What ought I to do?" his disciples answer, "Follow the Master." When asked "What may I hope?" an entire dispensation declares, "Peace in this world, and eternal life in the world to come" (D&C 59:23), indeed ultimately for "all that [the] Father hath" (D&C 84:38). Depressions and identity crises have a hard time holding up under that response. . . . We cannot but wonder what frenzy the world would experience if a chapter of the Book of Mormon or a section of the Doctrine and Covenants or a conference address by President Spencer W. Kimball were to be discovered by some playful shepherd boy in an earthen jar near the Dead Sea caves of Qumran. The beneficiaries would probably build a special shrine in Jerusalem to house it, being very careful to regulate temperatures and restrict visitors. They would undoubtedly protect against earthquakes and war. Surely the edifice would be as beautiful as the contents would be valuable; its cost would be enormous, but its worth would be incalculable. Yet for the most part we have difficulty giving away copies of sacred scripture much more startling in their origin. Worse yet, some of us, knowing of the scriptures, have not even tried to share them, as if an angel were an every-day visitor and a prophet just another man in the street. We forget that our fathers lived for many centuries without priesthood power or prophetic leadership, and "dark ages" they were indeed.

I see many so-called conservative commentators, including some faith leaders, focusing on favorable policy initiatives or court appointments to justify their acceptance of this damage, while de-emphasizing the impact of this president on basic norms and ethics. That strikes me as both hypocritical and wrong. The hypocrisy is evident if you simply switch the names and imagine that a President Hillary Clinton had conducted herself in a similar fashion in office. I've said this earlier but it's worth repeating: close your eyes and imagine these same voices if President Hillary Clinton had told the FBI director, 'I hope you will let it go,' about the investigation of a senior aide, or told casual, easily disprovable lies nearly every day and then demanded we believe them. The hypocrisy is so thick as to be almost darkly funny. I say this as someone who has worked in law enforcement for most of my life, and served presidents of both parties. What is happening now is not normal. It is not fake news. It is not okay. Whatever your politics, it is wrong to dismiss the damage to the norms and traditions that have guided the presidency and our public life for decades or, in many cases, since the republic was founded. It is also wrong to stand idly by, or worse, to stay silent when you know better, while a president so brazenly seeks to undermine public confidence in law enforcement institutions that were established to keep our leaders in check...without these checks on our leaders, without those institutions vigorously standing against abuses of power, our country cannot sustain itself as a functioning democracy. I know there are men and women of good conscience in the United States Congress on both sides of the aisle who understand this. But not enough of them are speaking out. They must ask themselves to what, or to whom, they hold a higher loyalty: to partisan interests or to the pillars of democracy? Their silence is complicity - it is a choice - and somewhere deep down they must know that. Policies come and go. Supreme Court justices come and go. But the core of our nation is our commitment to a set of shared values that began with George Washington - to restraint and integrity and balance and transparency and truth. If that slides away from us, only a fool would be consoled by a tax cut or different immigration policy.

In conclusion, the American century is not over, if by that we mean the extraordinary period of American pre-eminence in military, economic, and soft power resources that have made the United States central to the workings of the global balance of power, and to the provision of global public goods. Contrary to those who proclaim this the Chinese century, we have not entered a post-American world. But the continuation of the American century will not look like it did in the twentieth century. The American share of the world economy will be less than it was in the middle of the last century, and the complexity represented by the rise of other countries as well as the increased role of non-state actors will make it more difficult for anyone to wield influence and organize action. Analysts should stop using clichés about unipolarity and multipolarity. They will have to live with both in different issues at the same time. And they should stop talking and worrying about poorly specified concepts of decline that mix many different types of behavior and lead to mistaken policy conclusions. Leadership is not the same as domination. America will have to listen in order to get others to enlist in what former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called a multipartner world. It is important to remember that there have always been degrees of leadership and degrees of influence during the American century. The United States never had complete control. As we saw in Chapter 1, even when the United States had preponderant resources, it often failed to get what it wanted. And those who argue that the complexity and turmoil of today’s entropic world is much worse than the past should remember a year like 1956 when the United States was unable to prevent Soviet repression of a revolt in Hungary, French loss of Vietnam, or the Suez invasion by our allies Britain, France, and Israel. One should be wary of viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses. To borrow a comedian’s line, “hegemony ain’t what it used to be, but then it never was.” Now, with slightly less preponderance and a much more complex world, the United States will need to make smart strategic choices both at home and abroad if it wishes to maintain its position. The American century is likely to continue for a number of decades at the very least, but it will look very different from how it did when Henry Luce first articulated it.

Passivity is one of the main enemies of biblical masculinity and it’s most obvious where it’s needed most. It’s a pattern of waiting on the sidelines until you’re specifically asked to step in. Even worse than that, it can be a pattern of trying to duck out of responsibilities or to run away from challenges. Men who think conflict should be avoided, or who refuse to engage with those who would harm the body of Christ or their family, not only model passivity but fail in their responsibilities as protectors. Running to the battle means routinely taking a step toward the challenge — not away from it. Instead of running and hiding, it means running into the burning building or into any other situation that requires courage and/or strength. It means having a burden of awareness and consistently asking yourself, “Is there any testosterone needed in this situation?” That doesn’t mean being a fool who just rushes in, but simply being a leader with the instinct to go where the need is. So show leadership, protection and provision in your family, work, church, and community by consistently moving toward the action. Demonstrate your availability by consistently asking those you encounter, “Do you need anything?” Watch for needs and challenges in whatever situation you’re in and cultivate a habit of running to the battle. Keep your head Whether it was a bear attacking his sheep, Goliath looming in the distance, Saul hurling a spear at him or any other crisis David faced, he moved toward the action with calm resolve. He didn’t panic. He was a man of action and engagement. When there is a crisis, leaders don’t panic. Crisis reveals character and capacity. This is the point when true leaders are distinguished from others. So keep your head. Be anxious for nothing (Phil 4:6-7). Time is wasted while you panic. Just step forward. Be unflappable and resilient.

Stockdale Paradox This finding is named after Admiral James Stockdale, winner of the Medal of Honor, who survived seven years in a Vietcong POW camp by hanging on to two contradictory beliefs: His life couldn’t be worse at the moment, and his life would someday be better than ever. Like Stockdale, people at the good-to-great companies in our research confronted the most brutal facts of their current reality, yet simultaneously maintained absolute faith that they would prevail in the end. And they held both disciplines—faith and facts—at the same time, all the time.

My major goal in business was to learn. I had legislated in my mind for failure the worse possible scenario was I would learn a lot regardless of the outcome. This goal was the foundation for success of the business. Peldi, Balsamiq

He (Newt Gingrich as a freshman congressman) was both passionate about his goals and coldly analytical in his means.

Who better to teach than the most capable among us? And I’m not just talking about seminars or formal settings. Our actions and behaviors, for better or worse, teach those who admire and look up to us how to govern their own lives. Are we thoughtful about how people learn and grow? As leaders, we should think of ourselves as teachers and try to create companies in which teaching is seen as a valued way to contribute to the success of the whole. Do we think of most activities as teaching opportunities and experiences as ways of learning? One of the most crucial responsibilities of leadership is creating a culture that rewards those who lift not just our stock prices but our aspirations as well.

China can grow so fast only because its starting base is so low. The easiest way for China to grow is to relentlessly copy what has already worked in the West. And that’s exactly what it’s doing: executing definite plans by burning ever more coal to build ever more factories and skyscrapers. But with a huge population pushing resource prices higher, there’s no way Chinese living standards can ever actually catch up to those of the richest countries, and the Chinese know it. This is why the Chinese leadership is obsessed with the way in which things threaten to get worse. Every senior Chinese leader experienced famine as a child, so when the Politburo looks to the future, disaster is not an abstraction. The Chinese public, too, knows that winter is coming. Outsiders are fascinated by the great fortunes being made inside China, but they pay less attention to the wealthy Chinese trying hard to get their money out of the country. Poorer Chinese just save everything they can and hope it will be enough. Every class of people in China takes the future deadly seriously.

To make matters worse, most companies use the same standards for evaluating both routine and innovative work. They use conventional idea #6: Reward success, punish failure and inaction. This is fine for routine tasks. When known procedures are used by well-trained people, failure does signal improper training, weak motivation, or poor leadership. But applying this standard to innovative work stifles intelligent risks. The usual reward scheme means that, because people who do routine work succeed most of the time, they are glorified as winners. In contrast, people who do innovative work fail a lot. So they not only get few rewards, they may be denigrated as losers. In many companies, people who do routine work complain that “if those creative types just acted more like us, they would be more efficient and wouldn’t make all those mistakes!

Nevertheless, I gathered my courage and asked, "When I speak to Western audiences, should I encourage people to boycott those stores where sweatshop clothes are made?" I expected to get a full-octave blast against Americanization, globalization and our materialistic corruption of the world. He surprised me with his answer, however, which he spoke in a very sober voice. "No. If your people boycott those clothes, poor people will get poorer. The factory might close, and people getting pennies in a sweatshop will now have to resort to doing something else, maybe worse, like prostitution, in order to feed their families." "So what shall I tell my listeners?" I asked him. He replied, "Tell people, especially your businesspeople, to become executives for Nike and other multinational corporations that run these factories. In positions of leadership, they can bring a Christian influence of compassion and justice and mercy into that environment. They can make rules of how the factory workers are treated. That could turn a whole village toward the gospel.

The failure of the West fully to take advantage of the opportunity offered by a reformist president in Iran already looks like a bad mistake. One such opportunity came after the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States when members of the Iranian leadership (not just Khatami, but also Khamenei) condemned the terrorist action in forthright terms, and ordinary Iranians showed their sympathies with candlelit vigils in the streets of Tehran—more evidence of the marked difference of attitude between Iranians and other Middle Eastern peoples. Another opportunity came after Iran gave significant help to the coalition forces against the Taliban later in 2001, helping to persuade the Northern Alliance to accept democratic arrangements for post-Taliban Afghanistan.2 In 2002 Iranians were rewarded with President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech, which lumped Iran with Iraq and North Korea. Finally, the Bush administration ignored an Iranian offer in the spring of 2003 (shortly after the fall of Baghdad), via the Swiss, for bilateral talks toward a Grand Bargain that appeared to promise a possible resolution of the nuclear issue and de facto Iranian recognition of Israel. The purpose of all this is not to reinforce the cringing sense of guilt that bedevils many Western observers who look at the Middle East. It is not All Our Fault, and no doubt if the Iranians had been in the position of strength that Britain was between 1815 and 1950, or that the United States has been in since then, they would have behaved as badly, and quite possibly worse. The Iranians also missed opportunities for rapprochement in the Khatami years. But too often we have gotten things wrong, and that has had a cost. It is important to see events from an Iranian perspective, to see how we got things wrong, and to see what needs to be done in order to get them right. The most important thing is this: if we make commitments and assert certain principles, we must be more careful to mean what we say and to uphold those principles.

But the myth of job stability may be the least of our concerns. A 2011 study conducted by a team of social scientists at the University of Canberra in Australia concluded that having a job we hate is as bad for our health and sometimes worse than not having a job at all. Levels of depression and anxiety among people who are unhappy at work were the same or greater than those who were unemployed. Stress and anxiety at work have less to do with the work we do and more to do with weak management and leadership. When we know that there are people at work who care about how we feel, our stress levels decrease. But when we feel like someone is looking out for themselves or that the leaders of the company care more about the numbers than they do us, our stress and anxiety go up. This is why we are willing to change jobs in the first place; we feel no loyalty to a company whose leaders offer us no sense of belonging or reason to stay beyond money and benefits.

I’m giving you a chance to walk away, to live. Don’t be a fool--take it.” Cannan tucked his knife into the shaft of his boot, then cast his eyes over Steldor, Galen, Adrik and Koranis. All resolutely met his gaze. “I don’t see fear in this room, Narian,” he said, shaking his head. “Do what you must, as will we.” “Then you’re asking to die!” For a moment there was a pleading note in Narian’s voice, an indication of how torn he was about his position. He didn’t want to put these men to death. “If I arrest you, you will be executed. If I let you go forward, you will fail.” “The only way we could fail,” Steldor interjected in a low voice, “is by accepting what you have handed our people. We owe this to them.” “You owe them your leadership, not the sacrifice of your lives. The High Priestess will not relinquish this province, in that she is unyielding. She and the Overlord fought too long and too hard for it. Don’t do this.” My uncle approached the Cokyrian commander with an almost sympathetic expression. His dark eyes had lost none of their determination, but he meant to reach the young man with his words. “Who are you, Narian?” The question was strange, but Narian seemed to understand its significance. “From the moment you set foot in Hytanica, you have tried to play both sides. You’ve spent far too long being a Cokyrian with Hytanican blood, and it ends now, for better or worse. There is no more in between, so do what you must. Either have us arrested, or allow us to go forward.” Narian met Cannan’s gaze, not discomfited by the taller man’s proximity. In truth, he had nothing at all to fear from us, what with the powers he possessed. But I wished I could see something in his eyes, some indication of what he would do from here. “Very well, Captain. I will do as you say--what I must.” Showing us his back, Narian ascended the stairs, disappearing through the cellar door. Steldor immediately made to follow, but Cannan grasped his shirt. “Let me go,” my cousin snapped, but his father stepped closer, until their faces were just inches apart. “Don’t be reckless,” the captain muttered. “He will kill you if you challenge him.” Steldor gave in, and his father released his grip. “Then what do we do?” Galen asked. “Nothing has changed.” Cannan looked around at the men who would follow his orders, to the grave and beyond. “We will do exactly what we have planned. Until and unless Narian stops us, we proceed.” “But…but isn’t that dangerous?” King Adrik queried. “This has always been dangerous. But I’m willing to take a chance on Narian.” The silence in the aftermath of the captain’s statement reinforced my sense that, at a single wave of the Cokyrian commander’s hand, we would all be buried alive.

The wise leader does not intervene unnecessarily. The leader’s presence is felt, but often the group runs itself. Lesser leaders do a lot, say a lot, have followers, and form cults. Even worse ones use fear to energize the group and force to overcome resistance. Only the most dreadful leaders have bad reputations. Remember that you are facilitating another person’s process. It is not your process. Do not intrude. Do not control. Do not force your own needs and insights into the foreground. If you do not trust a person’s process, that person will not trust you.

There is nothing worse for a young convert than to be thrust into leadership without mentoring and ongoing coaching because the devil relishes these vulnerable souls.

Do you sense a depression in the body of Christ in America, as if something is badly wrong? We’re losing influence within our culture as the anti-Christian sentiment grows, yet you’d never know it in most churches—the smoke, lights, loud music and preaching rolls on as if all is well…Too often people come to the church, are deeply disappointed and as a result are turned off from the gospel. The church promises solutions but only offers lip service. We’ve become excellent at giving people a show on Sunday but lousy at showing them how to actually live…I recently spoke with two businessmen friends about why it’s hard to find a good church. Both are successful financially and are passionate believers. On the surface, they’re what every pastor needs. Yet after being active in a local church, they both became disillusioned with what they saw and how they were treated. As they recounted stories of how pastors felt threatened by their powerful personalities and positions, I felt sorry for my friends (for never experiencing the community they sought) and for the insecure leaders they served. Countless other mature Christians have been so wounded by leadership that they stay home on Sunday and “go to church” by watching Charles Stanley or Jack Hayford. They get a good message, some good music and an opportunity to “tithe” to that ministry. Sometimes this is a transitional period. Too often it’s not. But this isn’t Christian community. Aren’t we supposed to assemble with other believers? Aren’t we supposed to bring a hymn or a Scripture or a prophetic word when we meet? In larger churches this need is met in small groups or in various ministries of the church. There are many examples of healthy churches where this happens. But too often it isn’t…Until this happens, people—like my businessmen friends—will feel as if they’re drifting. They’ll never really find their place in the body of Christ. And sooner or later, they will ‘vote with their feet’ by going somewhere else—or worse still, nowhere.

Even worse, the messages sent to girls can move beyond encouraging superficial traits and veer into explicitly discouraging leadership. When a girl tries to lead, she is often labeled bossy. Boys are seldom called bossy because a boy taking the role of a boss does not surprise or offend. As someone who was called this for much of my childhood, I know that it is not a compliment.

There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away. —

the news blared abruptly with its perpetual urgency that made him wonder how the commentators endured the endless flow of crises. The President had been impeached again—the third one in six months. There were no candidates for his office. A church had been burned by its congregation. Two mayors had been assassinated within hours of each other. It was the same news he had heard six months ago. It would be the same again tomorrow and next month. The story of a planet repudiating all leadership. A lawlessness that was worse than anarchy, because there was still government

There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away,

diversity of opinion balanced with the need to make and implement decisions. Chronic indecision is not only inefficient and counterproductive, but it is deeply corrosive to morale. Curiosity. A deep and abiding curiosity enables the discovery of new people, places, and ideas, as well as an awareness and an understanding of the marketplace and its changing dynamics. The path to innovation begins with curiosity. Fairness. Strong leadership embodies the fair and decent treatment of people. Empathy is essential, as is accessibility. People committing honest mistakes deserve second chances, and judging people too harshly generates fear and anxiety, which discourage communication and innovation. Nothing is worse to an organization than a culture of fear. Thoughtfulness. Thoughtfulness is one of the most underrated elements of good leadership. It is the process of gaining knowledge, so an opinion rendered or decision made is more credible and more likely to be correct. It’s simply about taking the time to develop informed opinions. Authenticity. Be genuine. Be honest. Don’t fake anything. Truth and authenticity breed respect and trust.

the “Standard Start-up Leadership Vacuum,” and the result is that inexperienced founders find themselves having to hire and integrate experienced executives from the outside. The situation is made worse when those founders wait until the strain on the organization has become unbearable before making the new hires, meaning that all the leaders are new to the company precisely at the time when tension and uncertainty are running high. The key to navigating this transition is open-mindedness: insiders need to be open to the outside ideas of the new executives, while the outsiders need to be open to learning from what happened before they arrived.

There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away. —WINSTON S. CHURCHILL,

People committing honest mistakes deserve second chances, and judging people too harshly generates fear and anxiety, which discourage communication and innovation. Nothing is worse to an organization than a culture of fear. Thoughtfulness. Thoughtfulness is one of the most underrated elements of good leadership. It is the process of gaining knowledge, so an opinion rendered or decision made is more credible and more likely to be correct. It’s simply about taking the time to develop informed opinions. Authenticity. Be genuine. Be honest. Don’t fake anything. Truth and authenticity breed respect and trust. The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection. This doesn’t mean perfectionism at all costs, but it does mean a refusal to accept mediocrity or make excuses for something being “good enough.” If you believe that something can be made better, put in the effort to do it. If you’re in the business of making things, be in the business of making things great. Integrity. Nothing is more important than the quality and integrity of an organization’s people and its product. A company’s success depends on setting high ethical standards for all things, big and small. Another way of saying this is: The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

Rushton (2000) has shown that if we compare the ‘Big 3’ races – blacks, whites and Northeast Asians – there are clear and consistent differences, with East Asians at one end of spectrum and black people at the other. As these differences already show up in childhood, stand robust against environmental interventions, and as personality is at least 50% genetic and intelligence about 80% so, they are genetic differences. Northeast Asians score the highest in intelligence tests (105), blacks score the lowest (85), while whites are intermediate (100) but closer to Northeast Asians. Within these tests, whites have better verbal intelligence than Northeast Asians but much worse mathematical intelligence, meaning that Northeast Asians come out with higher ‘general intelligence’ overall. Real predictions about ‘character’ can be made from this, as intelligence is associated with emotional intelligence, cooperativeness, low self-esteem, a trusting nature, future-orientation, law-abidingness, intellectual curiosity, creativity, leadership ability, having a sense of humour, having a good memory, and even talking speed (see Jensen, 1998).

Optimism. One of the most important qualities of a good leader is optimism, a pragmatic enthusiasm for what can be achieved. Even in the face of difficult choices and less than ideal outcomes, an optimistic leader does not yield to pessimism. Simply put, people are not motivated or energized by pessimists. Courage. The foundation of risk-taking is courage, and in ever-changing, disrupted businesses, risk-taking is essential, innovation is vital, and true innovation occurs only when people have courage. This is true of acquisitions, investments, and capital allocations, and it particularly applies to creative decisions. Fear of failure destroys creativity. Focus. Allocating time, energy, and resources to the strategies, problems, and projects that are of highest importance and value is extremely important, and it’s imperative to communicate your priorities clearly and often. Decisiveness. All decisions, no matter how difficult, can and should be made in a timely way. Leaders must encourage a diversity of opinion balanced with the need to make and implement decisions. Chronic indecision is not only inefficient and counterproductive, but it is deeply corrosive to morale. Curiosity. A deep and abiding curiosity enables the discovery of new people, places, and ideas, as well as an awareness and an understanding of the marketplace and its changing dynamics. The path to innovation begins with curiosity. Fairness. Strong leadership embodies the fair and decent treatment of people. Empathy is essential, as is accessibility. People committing honest mistakes deserve second chances, and judging people too harshly generates fear and anxiety, which discourage communication and innovation. Nothing is worse to an organization than a culture of fear. Thoughtfulness. Thoughtfulness is one of the most underrated elements of good leadership. It is the process of gaining knowledge, so an opinion rendered or decision made is more credible and more likely to be correct. It’s simply about taking the time to develop informed opinions. Authenticity. Be genuine. Be honest. Don’t fake anything. Truth and authenticity breed respect and trust. The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection. This doesn’t mean perfectionism at all costs, but it does mean a refusal to accept mediocrity or make excuses for something being “good enough.” If you believe that something can be made better, put in the effort to do it. If you’re in the business of making things, be in the business of making things great. Integrity. Nothing is more important than the quality and integrity of an organization’s people and its product. A company’s success depends on setting high ethical standards for all things, big and small. Another way of saying this is: The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

Problems come with just being alive, and even more come with responsibility. When they come, you just suck it up and get started again. You are never caught up. I’ve lived by the proposition that solving problems is what leaders do. The day you are not solving problems or are not up to your butt in problems is probably a day you are no longer leading. If your desk is clean and no one is bringing you problems, you should be very worried. It means that people don’t think you can solve them or don’t want to hear about them. Or, far worse, it means they don’t think you care. Either way it means your followers have lost confidence in you and you are no longer their leader, no matter what your rank or the title on your door.

Worse, the more successful an individual is, the less likely it is that anyone will bring this unpleasant fact to his attention. Consequently, a leader considered an expert in one area is often treated as an expert in others as well. Leaders who are not in touch with their own weaknesses feel that they are as good as anybody else in their organization at anything that pertains to leadership. Many have even bought into the false notion that great leaders have no weaknesses. In their minds, to admit weakness is to diminish their effectiveness. Such leaders tend to hide their weaknesses, assuming they ever discover them.

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

At OBSS   An unexpected occurrence did come of this escapade, even though I didn’t care for the program. Andy, you may or may not be aware that Outward Bound teaches interpersonal and leadership skills, not to mention wilderness survival. The first two skillsets were not unlike our education at the Enlightened Royal Oracle Society (E.R.O.S.) or the Dale Carnegie course in which I had participated before leaving Malaya for school in England. It was the wilderness survival program I abhorred. Since I wasn’t rugged by nature (and remain that way to this day), this arduous experience was made worse by your absence. In 1970, OBSS was under the management of Singapore Ministry of Defence, and used primarily as a facility to prepare young men for compulsory ’National Service,’ commonly known as NS. All young and able 18+ Singaporean male citizens and second-generation permanent residents had to register for National Service compulsorily. They would serve either a two-year or twenty-two-month period as Full Time National Servicemen after completing the Outward Bound course. Pending on their individual physical and medical fitness, these young men would enter the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF), Singapore Police Force (SPF), or the Singapore Civil Defense Force (SCDF). Father, through his extensive contacts, enrolled me into the twenty-one-day Outward Bound summer course. There were twenty boys in my class. We were divided into small units under the guidance of an instructor. During the first few days at the base camp, we trained for outdoor recreation activities such as adventure racing, backpacking, cycling, camping, canoeing, canyoning, fishing, hiking, kayaking, mountaineering, horseback riding, photography, rock climbing, running, sailing, skiing, swimming, and a variety of sporting activities.

The first steps toward improvement involve recognizing weaknesses, making corrections, and cultivating strengths. Many reasons explain why church leadership is less than the best, and some of the following considerations may apply to you. • Perhaps we lack a clearly defined goal that will stretch us, challenge faith, and unify life’s activities. • Perhaps our faith is timid, and we hesitate to take risks for the kingdom. • Do we show the zeal of salvation in Christ, or is our demeanor morbid and sad? Enthusiastic leaders generate enthusiastic followers. • We may be reluctant to grasp the nettle of a difficult situation and deal courageously with it. Or we may procrastinate, hoping that problems will vanish with time. The mediocre leader postpones difficult decisions, conversations, and letters. Delay solves nothing, and usually makes problems worse. • Perhaps we sacrifice depth for breadth, and spreading ourselves thin, achieve only superficial results.

Abraham Lincoln, perhaps the most loved president of the United States, was also the most criticized president. Probably no politician in history had worse things said about him. Here’s how the Chicago Times in 1865 evaluated Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address the day after he delivered it: “The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat, and dish-watery utterances of a man who has been pointed out to intelligent foreigners as President of the United States.” Time, of course, has proved this scathing criticism wrong. 9.

There is only a one thing worse than an idiot: An idiot with a following.

Organizations thrive when leaders make the right decisions, and they fail when leaders make the wrong ones. What is often less obvious is the fact that organizations can suffer worse when leaders refuse to make any decision at all. Indecisiveness is one of history’s greatest leadership killers.

Finally, at least 30% of the variance in a company’s revenues and profitability can be tied to the working climate. The relationship between these three critical elements (emotional intelligence + leadership styles = working climate) and financial performance is significant, and every leader, for better or worse, influences it. 

This can have devastating consequences for the fast-growing company. Over a short period of time, say a year, the number of employees can leap from 50 to 150 in a startup, or from 150 to 500 or more during a later phase of rapid growth when the business model is promising and the funding is in the bank. Seemingly overnight, the new employees can vastly outnumber their predecessors, and this dynamic can permanently redefine the corporate culture. Brent Gleeson, a leadership coach and Navy SEAL combat veteran, writes, “Organizational culture comes about in one of two ways. It’s either decisively defined, nurtured and protected from the inception of the organization; or—more typically—it comes about haphazardly as a collective sum of the beliefs, experiences and behaviors of those on the team. Either way, you will have a culture. For better or worse.”2

The worse thing that can happen to any of us is to have a path that’s made too smooth. One of the greatest blessings the Lord ever gave us was a cross. —Charles H. Spurgeon

Wilhelm Reich in The Sexual Revolution summarized the specific objective reasons for the failure of the Russian communes in the best analysis to date: 1) Confusion of the leadership and evasion of the problem. 2) The laborious task of reconstruction in general given the cultural backwardness of Old Russia, the war, and famine. 3) Lack of theory. The Russian Revolution was the first of its kind. No attempt had been made to deal with emotional-sexual-familial problems in the formulation of basic revolutionary theory. (Or, in our terms, there had been a lack of “consciousness raising” about female/ child oppression and a lack of radical feminist analysis prior to the revolution itself.) 4) The sex-negative psychological structure of the individual, created and reinforced throughout history by the family, hindered the individual's liberation from this very structure. As Reich puts it: It must be remembered that human beings have a tremendous fear of just that kind of life for which they long so much but which is at variance with their own structure. 5) The explosive concrete complexities of sexuality. In the picture that Reich draws of the time, one senses the immense frustration of people trying to liberate themselves without having a well-thought-out ideology to guide them. In the end, that they attempted so much without an adequate preparation made their failure even more extreme: To destroy the balance of sexual polarization without entirely eliminating it was worse than nothing at all.

This work ahead will require leaders who put the good of the city above all else. The greatest failures of Dinkins and de Blasio were their failures of leadership, not of policy. They let the city go adrift, but worse, they made everyone who lived in it feel adrift.

Alice Heath, a student of Richard’s at the Harvard Kennedy School and one of his current teaching assistants, experienced this maxim very clearly when she started working with state child welfare agencies, whose mission is to prevent child abuse and neglect. The children and families they work with face very tough circumstances. Unfortunately, there is often no policy choice that a child welfare agency’s leadership can make that is likely to completely prevent abuse or neglect. “Completely preventing abuse or neglect would likely require draconian measures that would not be good for anyone. The best an agency can do is make the choice that has a higher probability of a better outcome relative to the other choices. Even with the best decisions there will still, sadly, be a high chance that some children suffer abuse and neglect. I have seen state legislators and commentators fail to understand this idea over and over, reading every tragic incident as a decision-making failure rather than the result of a set of choices where the best option is not a good option. As a result, state child welfare directors too often have very short terms and agencies lack stable leadership, which only makes things worse for the children and families who need help.

First, if firms are to be capable of exploiting existing business models and reconfiguring existing assets in ways that allow them to explore into the future, leadership is critical. As we will see in subsequent chapters, this ability needs to be nurtured; if it is not protected, it can easily be lost. A second important theme deserving of our attention is that of organizational alignment and how the capabilities needed to explore and exploit are fundamentally different. What it takes for a firm to win in mature markets is almost the opposite of what is required for new markets and technologies. Worse, success at exploitation almost always makes it harder for firms to succeed at exploration. We quickly summarize these lessons before offering a more formal framework in Chapter 8.

Fairness. Strong leadership embodies the fair and decent treatment of people. Empathy is essential, as is accessibility. People committing honest mistakes deserve second chances, and judging people too harshly generates fear and anxiety, which discourage communication and innovation. Nothing is worse to an organization than a culture of fear.

As I near the end of all of that and think back on what I’ve learned, these are the ten principles that strike me as necessary to true leadership. I hope they’ll serve you as well as they’ve served me. Optimism. One of the most important qualities of a good leader is optimism, a pragmatic enthusiasm for what can be achieved. Even in the face of difficult choices and less than ideal outcomes, an optimistic leader does not yield to pessimism. Simply put, people are not motivated or energized by pessimists. Courage. The foundation of risk-taking is courage, and in ever-changing, disrupted businesses, risk-taking is essential, innovation is vital, and true innovation occurs only when people have courage. This is true of acquisitions, investments, and capital allocations, and it particularly applies to creative decisions. Fear of failure destroys creativity. Focus. Allocating time, energy, and resources to the strategies, problems, and projects that are of highest importance and value is extremely important, and it’s imperative to communicate your priorities clearly and often. Decisiveness. All decisions, no matter how difficult, can and should be made in a timely way. Leaders must encourage a diversity of opinion balanced with the need to make and implement decisions. Chronic indecision is not only inefficient and counterproductive, but it is deeply corrosive to morale. Curiosity. A deep and abiding curiosity enables the discovery of new people, places, and ideas, as well as an awareness and an understanding of the marketplace and its changing dynamics. The path to innovation begins with curiosity. Fairness. Strong leadership embodies the fair and decent treatment of people. Empathy is essential, as is accessibility. People committing honest mistakes deserve second chances, and judging people too harshly generates fear and anxiety, which discourage communication and innovation. Nothing is worse to an organization than a culture of fear. Thoughtfulness. Thoughtfulness is one of the most underrated elements of good leadership. It is the process of gaining knowledge, so an opinion rendered or decision made is more credible and more likely to be correct. It’s simply about taking the time to develop informed opinions. Authenticity. Be genuine. Be honest. Don’t fake anything. Truth and authenticity breed respect and trust. The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection. This doesn’t mean perfectionism at all costs, but it does mean a refusal to accept mediocrity or make excuses for something being “good enough.” If you believe that something can be made better, put in the effort to do it. If you’re in the business of making things, be in the business of making things great. Integrity. Nothing is more important than the quality and integrity of an organization’s people and its product. A company’s success depends on setting high ethical standards for all things, big and small. Another way of saying this is: The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

Inside myself I’m ashamed, as I think our own system of government is seriously deficient. Parliament is dead. Government is bureaucratic. Political leadership hardly exists. We are stagnant and ossified. We are living in post-imperial delusion, with no political vibrancy, and in a climate of political debate which is outdated. It’s not just the Conservative side. Jeremy Corbyn is reviving absurd revamped socialist thought, such as wanting to nationalise everything. But our side is arguably even worse.

The new “men of steel” included the leader of the Donetsk group, Rinat Akhmetov, who in the early 1990s took over leadership of a company called Lux, known to the Ukrainian authorities for its criminal origins and connections. In the Dnipropetrovsk region, two local businessmen divided major metallurgical assets: Viktor Pinchuk, who married into President Kuchma’s family, and Igor Kolomoisky, who established one of the first major private banks in Ukraine. Others also shared the loot of post-Soviet Ukrainian privatization. Still, the corrupt and often criminal nature of the privatization process aside, the “oligarchization” of the Ukrainian economy coincided with the end of economic decline. Ukraine began the new millennium with a rapid economic recovery, and, for better or worse, the oligarchs were important figures in that new success story.

Self-deception is like this. It blinds us to the true causes of problems, and once we’re blind, all the “solutions” we can think of will actually make matters worse.

A car can take you from point A to B . It can take you anywhere you want . Most Importantly a car doesn’t start Itself. You start It. You Instruct It on which direction It should go. On how fast or slow It should go. It Is good to have a car, But at the end of the day. You are the driver and the one who Is In control of It. You can make the most of It or make the worse out of It. A car can change you or change your life. Get yourself a car. If you want to live a better life. Anywhere I have used the word car replace it with the word career and read again.

be a wrong to me; and much worse, a wrong to the country.” The standards

Dear Woman, when you are in position of power, it becomes your moral obligation to help rise other women around you. Do not become the oppressor because you were oppressed at some point. That’s worse than a man oppressing. - Pavithra Urs

First, socialism — the belief that the earth belongs to labor — is my moral being. In fact, it is my religion, the values that anchor the commitments that define my life. Second, “old school” implies putting in work year after year for the good cause. In academia one runs across people who call themselves Marxists and go to lots of conferences but hardly ever march on a picket line, go to a union meeting, throw a brick or simply help wash the dishes after a benefit. What’s even worse, they deign to teach us the “real Marx” but lack the old Moor’s fundamental respect for individual working people and his readiness to become a poor outlaw on their behalf. Finally, plain “socialist” expresses identification with the broad movement and the dream rather than with a particular program or camp. I have strong, if idiosyncratic, opinions on all the traditional issues — for example, the necessity of an organization of organizers (call it Leninism, if you want) but also the evils of bureaucracy and permanent leaderships (call it anarchism if you wish) — but I try to remind myself that such positions need to be constantly reassessed and calibrated to the conjuncture. One is always negotiating the slippery dialectic between individual reason, which must be intransigently self-critical, and the fact that one needs to be part of a movement or a radical collective in order, as Sartre put it, to “be in history.” Moral dilemmas and hard choices come with the turf and they cannot be evaded with “correct lines.