When speaking to groups about leadership, I've found that there's little argument when I suggest that personal character is the defining quality of outstanding leaders. For a moment, think about the people who are making (or who have made) an impact on your life. In my business career, there were three leaders who influenced me profoundly. What I learned from my first boss - I was in my Twenties - was to DWYSYWD! ('Do what you say you will do.') I attached this dictum to every task I undertook in those young, ambitious years. The mantra became a lifelong, unshakeable habit. The second leader taught me to carve out time to 'do only the things you can do, because that's what the company pays you for. ' Otherwise, he suggested, 'they'll find someone else to do your job!' In other words, he encouraged me to be indispensable . He told me that every person in my work environment, every interruption, would attempt to steal that critical sol...
Tomorrow we choose the next ‘Leader of the free world’ – an ethical enigma or a reality star? First off: that's not my front garden! For eighteen months Americans have been trudging through the stinking mangrove swamp of this election. And now firm ground is a footstep away. Or is it? When the unlamented Richard (‘I am not a crook’) Nixon choppered away from the White House lawn in August 1974 Gerald Ford, his Veep, was soon to say ‘Our long national nightmare is over.’ This nation may have similar feelings on Wednesday, forty-two years later, when the winner of the 2016 Presidential election is confirmed. But is the nightmare over? Are we to have a reality star, his Slovenian wife, and their ambitious, telegenic family in the White House; or will it be an ethically-challenged political survivor and her ‘hard-dog-to-keep-on-the-porch’ husband? We have to choose between a grandstanding, peevish man-baby with about as much grasp of world events as an infan...
Much has already been written and shown about the bloodshed at Orlando, the largest mass killing in American history - in a country that suffers a 'mass killing' (in which four or more people in one setting are killed by guns) EVERY DAY. I just want to add that it beggars belief that a man who: had been interviewed twice by the FBI; whose Taliban-supporting Afghani father posts protests against the American-backed Afghan government; a killer whose second wife left him after three months because she found him 'bi-polar, violent and abusive'; that such a man could walk into a gun shop the day before the massacre and - not being on any kind of Homeland Security 'watch list' - could LEGALLY buy an assault weapon and a hand gun. For all the wrong reasons the phrase 'only in America' comes to mind. Surely this latest tragedy must bring the Republican congress and its bedfellows - gun manufacturers and the National Rifle Association (NRA) - to its se...
Comments