Some years ago there was a horrific crash during training maneuvers by a US Air Force precision flying team. All four aircraft in the group failed to pull up from a steep dive, and piled directly into the desert floor. The official statement blamed a mechanical malfunction in the lead aircraft, but the general view among military pilots seemed to revolve around a sort of human error peculiar to this special type of formation flying.

A fighter pilot explained it this way: These teams perform extraordinarily precise maneuvers at stupendously high-speed; there is no room for miscommunication or even collaboration. There is one leader, and three followers. Screaming above the desert floor at hundreds of miles an hour with perhaps only inches separating their wingtips, each follower focuses intently on maintaining constant speed and direction, with his single reference point being his relative position to a particular physical point located on the lead aircraft; he focuses on maintaining that exactly as specified, to the exclusion of all other facts roaring by.

As for the leader, his job is to follow the choreographed route, executing the exactly specified directions and speeds for the precisely specified durations. He has no time to check to make sure his followers are in position behind and around him; he relies on their focus on him for that, and they rely on his focus on the itinerary to execute the drill.

In the course of this, the leader will use features on the ground or the surrounding mountains toward which he may be momentarily heading to help him maintain direction. When the prescribed time for the current leg expires, he will shift to the next maneuver, and the next landmark.

This all requires a degree of focus that is so intense as to exclude all else. No peripheral considerations, no stray thinking allowed. The leader intent on his object, the followers on the leader.

In the case of this accident, the general impression of other fighter pilots is that the lead pilot may have became lost in the intensity of his concentration on the desert floor landmark he had selected for that leg of the drill, which then resolved into a hypnotic fixation. Losing even the limited perspective that his function restricted him to, he drove his aircraft straight into his focal point on the ground. His followers, intent as ever only on doing their jobs while wholly dependent on him doing his, drove straight in after him, maintaining perfect formation to the end.

Precision drill teams like this do great good for the military and the country, acting as grand ambassadors for the Armed Forces, exhibiting the great pride and honor inherent in uniformed service, as well as demonstrating the inspiring discipline, spectacular skill, and quietly relentless courage that such service both requires and elicits from those who answer its call. There is sometimes a great cost paid in providing this good, and this accident is an especially devastating example of that.

But we want to note here that the things these teams work so hard to display so stupendously is what we have just noted above: pride, honor, discipline, skill, team spirit, dedication. Not leadership.

The form of leadership/followership that can nominally be drawn from the interaction of the drill team members offers a dramatically visual depiction of much of what the modern leadership movement (MLM) teaches about individual leadership and the roles of those who are expected to submit to and partake in it. Indeed, while metaphors typically can’t bear all of the burden placed on them, this one doesn’t carry enough to faithfully describe the expectations made of the sort of leader the movement promotes. It is pretty good, however, at depicting the complete and rootless dependence the MLM expects followers to invest in that leader.

An interesting difference, though, is that the faith placed by the drill team “followers” in their leader is justified (extraordinarily rare accidents like the above notwithstanding) precisely because he is not the sort of leader promoted by the MLM. His “leadership” is tightly choreographed and scripted. His expression of it is tightly circumscribed and detailed. He is not a visionary the consequences of whose actions and decisions we are supposed to simply accept on faith to be constructive. They have been pre-planned, calibrated, tested. Everyone – whatever their position in the formation – has contributed, studied, and internalized them before taking to the air to perform the drill.

So these drills are not a display of leadership at all. Certainly not of the sort that is practiced in the mission-oriented, highly decentralized, and dynamically shifting operating structures of the modern US military.

Nor should they be the pattern you impose on or submit to in your own organizations. You want to limit your perspective or your freedom of action neither to the inviolable constraints of an inflexible script, nor to an inflexible and ill-advised faith in a leader whose qualities you don’t understand and whose “leadership” you don’t collaborate with.

No individual, and no organization, can bear the great rush of disorienting dynamics unleashed by such a relationship. The unscripted and unconstrained individual leadership promoted by the MLM, combined with the tightly scripted and willfully constrained followership expected to multiply its power, is virtually assured to produce the cataclysmic results that are the exception in the military approach. The MLM prescriptions for individual leadership ultimately and inescapably generate a closed, self-referential system which careens who knows where with who knows what results around it in the real world.

One day such a leader will become dangerously disoriented by the unnatural and unsustainable relationship you have established with him or her, and lead the entire organization to an unexpectedly sudden doom, everyone all the while completely content and entirely unaware that there has been the slightest cause for concern. The leaders and the followers, mutually misled and hypnotically unhitched from reality, will head together, fatally enmeshed in their increasingly unrealistic relationship, right over the cliff.

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Today’s tips: Speaking of delinking focus from perspective, please see this piece from The Presurfer, describing what happens when squads of foraging ants are separated from the main colony.

And speaking of the military, please see this piece from The Economist about a stunningly innovative new communications antenna – here when you need it, gone when you don’t.

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Technorati Tags: US Air Force, military, collaboration, leader, follower, discipline, skill, courage, leadership, individual leadership, visionary, mission, decentralized, organization, perspective, followership, Presurfer, Economist, innovative, communication

I once heard a company commander in the Marines criticize a then-common means of dealing with individuals who were chronic discipline problems: arrange for their reassignment to a non-deploying unit. “I don’t transfer problems,” he said with a resolute determination that brooked no argument. “I fix them.”

I was impressed by that, and inclined to follow his highly responsible sounding no-excuses attitude. But I later learned that he was mostly wrong. On the one hand, personalities of this sort won’t reform easily if at all. On the other, you aren’t in the business of reforming their personalities.

As a result, with this self-delusive “the buck stops here” attitude, all you do is set yourself up for an interminable losing struggle that saps your energy, the resources of your unit, and the morale of your staff. Jerks that require this sort of attention are more than individual problems to be solved; they are black holes of negativity, sucking all the productivity, solidarity, and initiative from ever-growing segments of your organization. They are a poison injecting damaging dynamics into the body of the business, infecting some with the same disease, and suppressing the ability and inclination of others to resist its spread.

So what do you do? Buy Professor Bob Sutton’s “The No Asshole Rule.” Look at the cover. Read the highly engaging and illuminatingly concise (yet still authoritatively comprehensive) book to learn the nature and scope of the problem. Then consider the cover again and fix its lesson firmly in your mind. The rule is the title, and the method of implementing it is the graphic depicted next: a delete button.

This is easily among the most productive generalist management books I’ve read in a long while. Like most superior books of this sort, it offers actionable insight well beyond the immediate range of its topic, insights that will inform other of your efforts to manage effectively than those it specifically addresses.

But that’s surely not to say that the topic at hand isn’t valuable enough. You will begin with an organizationally-effective definition of what workplace jerks are, move on to a revealing explanation of how damaging they can be and why, and then learn how to establish practical methods for deleting them (as well as several solid rationales for why you should, without hesitation, do just that). What’s more, you will discover how to honestly examine the possibility that you are being infected by – or even are the source of – the malignancy yourself, and how to remedy that.

But if you are unavoidably the victim, and if neither a delete button nor an ejection seat are practical options, you will also be given strong, effective tips on how to survive jerk bosses – and even workplaces thoroughly infested with jerks – without succumbing to that disease yourself, or to other very real, and extraordinarily debilitating, stress-related maladies the struggle can cause.

As mentioned, this book is compact while still very effectively and satisfyingly covering all the ground; it is entertaining, but in a way that is germane, contributing greater meaning to the text rather than distracting filler to the pages.

Professor Sutton’s “The No Asshole Rule” is deservedly a best-seller. It deserves a place on your reading list as well – the next place. Make it your first New Year’s resolution to read this terrific book. Make it your next to implement the rule. You will undoubtedly enjoy a productive, and certainly a more rewarding, year for having done so.

Happy New Year!

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Technorati Tags: company, commander, Marines, discipline, business, energy, resources, morale, staff, negativity, productivity, solidarity, initiative, organization, dynamics, Bob Sutton, management, insight, workplace

We talked Thursday about asking what we want from interactions with our colleagues at work, whether peers, juniors, or seniors. We want to place the relationships in a sustainable and productive context, and to be sure we begin to see ourselves as co-contributors rather than the center of a universe with only uncooperative problems for satellites.

It’s a powerful question, and one that really should be asked before any undertaking in the workplace: a meeting, a new initiative, a delegation, a negotiation – even a chance encounter; we should develop a mindset for approaching work this way which serves as the basis for our thinking and reactions in any setting.

So, it is worth taking a moment to make the argument again that this is neither calculating (or, at least, not coldly so), nor does it proscribe the eventual development of richer personal relationships than those based on “what can we do for each other?” assessments. What it is, though, is the fundamental basis for any relationship that begins at work – however more complex that relationship may become or into whatever other parts of our lives it may come to reach.

It provides the core integrity of any such relationship, one that does not rely on mistaken assumptions about others’ interests or one’s own perhaps pretentious self-regard.  Moreover, whatever further aspects a relationship may take on, continuing to ask this question also remains the necessary basis for the interactions at work between the parties to it. If it isn’t, the entire relationship risks degenerating under the distortions suffered by those that were poorly sown and grown from the start.

The calculations prompted by the question, though, can be problematic, if not organized and worked out from the right perspective. We’ll look at that tomorrow. As always, we hope you’ll join us.

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This post is a part of a series. You can learn about and link to the other articles here: Managing life, work, and life at work

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Today’s tip: Please be sure to stop over and visit this month’s Leadership Development Carnival, hosted by Becky Robinson of LeaderTalk. It is a brilliantly organized collection of terrific resources, and it includes a clever link to a page allowing you to follow those authors that are on Twitter. Outstanding – check it out!

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Technorati Tags: interaction, colleague, work, relationship, workplace, meeting, initiative, delegation, negotiation, assumption, perspective, Becky Robinson, LeaderTalk, Twitter

We often think that the best managers – or, especially, “leaders” – connect on a deep and profound level with their employees, establishing a mutual understanding and commitment to each other. The sad reality, though, as mentioned yesterday, is that most of us lack the perspective, maturity, and discipline to pull it off.

That may seem a harsh claim to make, but if we engage in this sort of thing with colleagues for its own sake, it is inevitable. It means that we are essentially focused on ourselves, and for that very reason are losing our ability to be effective at our work. In such an event, what we wind up with is a disorienting mish-mash of motives and misunderstandings spinning around our attempts to relate to each other.

What we really should be doing is establishing and reinforcing the core basis of our mutual presence in the collaborative enterprise – the relationship of each of us not to each other, but to the work we have gathered together in our organizations to undertake. In the workplace, any relationships nurtured on any other ground than that are bound to wither – and often destructively so.

But if we are mindful of the real context of our connections, we can build them into truly meaningful and rewarding – rather than artificial and self-aggrandizing, even self-deceptively manipulative – relationships. Every facet of such interactions will be reinforced with manifest integrity and purpose – to the benefit of our organizations, surely, and via that of ourselves.

It is under such circumstances that work takes on its powerful secondary role in our lives, as a venue for social interaction and contribution. And it is in this way that we will have begun to resolve the perceived contradictions between our personal and our work lives.

So, when you are attempting to reevaluate your place in your work and its place in your life, consider this view of the matter: you will better weave both parts of your world into a coherent whole if you treat each of them as appropriate to the context in which they occur. We don’t – at least a first – love whoever we happen to work with like family. We don’t – at least in the beginning – view our co-workers as our faithful friends or good neighbors just because we happen to have the same signature on our paychecks. We neither expect from nor do things for our coworkers that we would with regard to our actual family, our true friends, or our real neighbors.

It can come very close to that, though, in time. But only because we sow these relationships in the right soil, soil to which they are native and in which they will flourish.

More on what this means to you in your daily work, tomorrow. See you then.

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This post is a part of a series. You can learn about and link to the other articles here: Managing life, work, and life at work

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Today’s tip: Speaking of connecting with your staff and developing a strong, effective, workplace culture, please see this excellent post on the subject by Miki Saxon.

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Technorati Tags: manager, leader, employee, perspective, maturity, discipline, colleague, effective, work, enterprise, organization, workplace, relationship, integrity, purpose, co-worker, culture, Miki Saxon

Excellent stories have been stacking up, with no logical place or time to link to them. So, we’re going to do a roundup today as a venue for offering these truly worthwhile resources.

Dopes. In his classic “Up the Organization,” which every manager should read, Robert Townsend touched on the then relatively new issue of gender equality in the workplace. His conclusion, perhaps only partly an artifact of the times, was that there was really no contest: it is simply too easy for women to turn men into gibbering idiots. Now comes evidence, as if we needed it, to support this view: please this brief summary of the research from neatorama.

Diversity. Please see The Economist for this interesting array of who would’ve thought stories:

• Did you need any further proof that so-called traditional university education is on the way out? See this about how the gamers may have a lot more right than we ever would have expected.
• Things are always more complicated than those who hope to close the door on discussion would like to have it. See this about how genes are not always the architects of our fates, but rather just as likely the victims of our actions.
• This is a fascinating piece about how to make bridges last just long enough to continue offering their primary function when it is needed most, after a major disaster such as an earthquake. The thinking involved in this hard-worked innovation is terrific in and of itself – but consider also the freedom enjoyed by the researcher to explore this unlikely avenue of inquiry. You will also want to see this one about self-monitoring bridges.
• And here’s another example of that terrifically dynamic and delightfully unconstrained spirit of curiosity – whether competitive or otherwise: it’s about your tires. And you thought your brakes were smart.

Dedication. An at once devastating commentary on contemporary culture and a really inspiring account of a truly world-class hero, by Gregg Easterbrook at the WSJ.

Deliberation. Surely a valuable characteristic, but perhaps not quite as exclusive as we thought. Please see the WSJ again about the social behavior of – bacteria.

Decisiveness. We place a lot of faith in this characteristic, and look for the right individual traits or collaborative circumstances for assuring that it is well placed. It turns out, though, that we should give things more time for deliberation and reflection, rather than relying on specific tricks and gimmicks. Please see the always enjoyable yet studious PsyBlog for why groups can drive individuals to extreme positions, and warp our decision-making. Next, visit the site again for another manager’s must-read about our internal confusion between understanding and acceptance.

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Today’s tip: Speaking of delightful diversity, please see this list of modest proposals by Michael Wade. My absolute favorite is number seven. Yours?

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Technorati Tags: resource, Robert Townsend, equality, workplace, neatorama, Economist, university, education, innovation, freedom, curiosity, culture, Gregg Easterbrook, WSJ, characteristic, trait, deliberation, reflection, PsyBlog, manager, understanding, Michael Wade

As the creature emerged from the chrysalis, the documentary narrator, himself a prominent scientist in the field, announced that the previously observed grub was now revealing its true identity – the adult form of a wasp.

But is that true? After all, some scientists argue that an adult is really just an egg’s way of making another egg.

And, as it turns out, many insects have egg, grub, or pupa stages that last much longer than their adult stages. And that’s not all: some adult insects are so obviously insignificant a part of their own life cycle that they even completely lack mouth parts or digestive systems – their purpose is simply to procreate, restarting the process. They retain enough energy from the grub stage to do that, and then they die; usually within hours, some within 30 minutes, of emerging into adulthood.

There are insects that exist for years in the egg stage alone. Others, known for their charmingly benign vegetarianism as adults, are actually voracious carnivores as grubs, devouring other insects and grubs – and even small fish and animals.

So, the question isn’t merely which comes first, but which is the actual organism – which stage, if any single one, is the point of it all? Why and how?

And what’s more, the question for us, of course, isn’t really about the dynamics of insect life cycles, but rather about the life cycles of the dynamics where we work. And it really is worth thinking carefully about, before we act on the wrong facts, or invest too much in misplaced assumptions.

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Today’s tip: Speaking of getting it all wrong, but continuing to pour good money after bad anyway, please see this piece from PsyBlog about why groups may not be the best format after all for processing information and making decisions.

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Technorati Tags: scientist, purpose, process, dynamics, work, fact, invest, assumption, PsyBlog, information, decision

As mentioned in response to one of Fred H. Schliegel‘s always thought-provoking comments, to a recent post, much of what has been written here over the past few months has had three purposes. One is to relate the topic at hand to its application at work; another is to consider the manner in which it is understood and manipulated by those of us who think about or attempt to act upon it; and the third is to offer a look at it with respect to its place in current events – especially political and social events particularly, but not exclusively, in the United States.

This can be difficult to do, of course, in a basically brief format like this. For example, a recent post about diversity attracted some interesting responses, both in the comment thread and directly.  Most of them seemed to assume that the point of the post had to do with diversity as determined by ethnicity, race, gender, or similarly distinguishable characteristics. Many of these are highly charged politically, and thoroughly legislated (or, at least, litigated). But none of them were the principle subject of the post.

These forms of diversity and the issues that arise around them certainly can be contentious and warrant mature attention by management. But they are both largely a defensive issue and a most unfortunate one. Distinctions like these, as well as related ones such as nationality, creed, and the like, are the least important ones in a dynamic organization. That is to say that they, in and of themselves, are not necessarily productive, creatively conflicting, or inherently contributive to the progress of the business. They are an issue for reasons unrelated to their presence (or absence) in the organization itself.

The important and valuable forms of diversity needed by a business – and often most vigorously and successfully resisted – are those related to differences in personality, values, artistic or intellectual inclinations, trained skills, native ability, and even character traits such as energy, attentiveness, insularity or gregariousness.

One of the things the referred to post attempted to argue, largely ineptly, was that we need the second form of diversity, but will attain it neither by seeking it directly, nor by seeking the first form. Our attempts to attain the first form are largely a response to the requirements of the greater society, not of the business. If we forget that, and presume that we will successfully use our organization to achieve societal aims, or to attain the benefits of the second form of diversity, we are likely not merely to fail in those efforts, but to exacerbate the shortcomings we hope to relieve.

That is a conundrum faced by managers of all types at all levels, in business, not-for-profit, and government. We have requirements that are legitimately imposed on us from without, and that have no obvious relation to the needs of our organizations. But our failure to fulfill them can create that relation in a more-or-less negative fashion. And then, our efforts to remove the controversy from the issue by responding mechanically or according to a template of one sort or another can run the risk of generating unintended organizational entropy, rather than the intended synergy.

Like many issues in management, managers are left to sort out a wide range of matters of varying degrees of organizational relevance, any one of which’s relevance can dramatically alter according to how it is, or is perceived to have been, sorted out.

So, what to do? The fundamental point of the previous diversity post is that you should focus on the strategic aim, operational goals, and consequent values of the organization, and let the diversity form of its own accord around these weight-bearing columns of the group structure. This will help produce sustainably creative complementarity, rather than the sort of rigid and fundamentally irrelevant diversity that so often is actually self-destructive.

Tomorrow, we’ll take a brief look at another aspect of this issue. As always, your thoughts are welcome; stentorian proclamations of The Truth perhaps rather more warmly.

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Today’s tip: Cultural Offering has recently passed the important milestone of two years of continuous publishing of endlessly fascinating and rewarding material. Please help him celebrate by visiting – doing so will doubtless become an eagerly sought-after milestone in your daily reading.

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Technorati Tags: purpose, work, current events, United States, diversity, ethnicity, race, gender, management, nationality, creed, organization, productive, conflict, progress, business, values, skill, ability, character, trait, energy, society, manager, not-for-profit, government, entropy, synergy, strategic aim, goal, Cultural Offering, Fred H. Schliegel

Typically, diversity is not destructive at all. Even when it seems most unproductive, it might be working its greatest creative magic. But when it is a conscious construction, it can at the very least be problematic – in its very deliberateness introducing tensions into the dynamics of the workplace that have nothing to do with the work, and that contribute nothing to it.

One way to get a feel for this is by considering the common refrain that opposites attract. The truth is that they don’t. They repel. Yin and yang, for example, don’t complete each other. They annihilate each other. They don’t signal ever cycling harmony, but rather the inevitability of destruction following from creation.

It is complements – not opposites – that attract. Organizations don’t need people with a range of strengths, abilities, and talents which conflict, but rather which combine to accomplish corporate aims. One of the threads that must be found woven through them all is a common predisposition to bend their shoulders together, albeit in their varying ways, to jointly pursue these goals.

This is the tricky thing about common purpose, culture, and diversity. Pursuing any one of them for its own sake is likely to undermine, or even destroy, the others. Pursue your organizational purpose, and bend your means to its end – not it to theirs.

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Today’s tip: Please take a moment to read this insightful essay on the impact an assignment in America made on a UK correspondent, written on the occasion of his return home.

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Technorati Tags: diversity, productive, creative, dynamics, workplace, work, harmony, destruction, creation, purpose, culture, organization, America, UK

We’ve noted over the past two days that a historic feature of international law holds that regimes that are tolerated by their people must be viewed as fundamentally legitimate. A problem with this is that it is often impractical for those people to do other than try to tolerate the otherwise intolerable, lending an implausible legitimacy to some pretty unpleasant regimes. As a result, leaders and followers alike can find themselves desperately collaborating in some disturbingly Orwellian devices to help them accommodate to the facts on the ground.

This happens in the world of work, as well, among organizations in all realms of life. The rhetoric is always fashionable to a fault, but the reality less so – and often calculatingly exploitative. And this leads to a second problem.

This is that there increasingly can be found an outside observer who is willing to drum up sufficient self-righteous indignity to ignore international law. The argument is made that particularly upsetting regimes are not legitimate, do not represent the will of their people despite the latter’s sullen tolerance, and that the international community is subject to an overriding moral imperative to intervene. These are extraordinarily difficult arguments to withstand, and so such interventions are becoming more and more common – and even are carving out their own place in the canon of international law.

And, again, a parallel development has similarly been influencing the world of organizations. Labor relations are legislated, community relations are regulated, and some of the most striking details of daily operations are mandated – from hours worked, to the employee selection and termination processes, to, of course, health care – and even the sort of product or service produced.

In the realm of international law, most of us understand the powerful logic being defied, and support at least one or another of the more gripping interventions, anyway. We recognize the insidious damage this does to the very international relations we aim to elevate, but we nevertheless act in the moment to relieve immediate suffering.

In the world of work, we do the same, step by step, until we find ourselves looking back in amazement at the massive, suffocating web of good will we have wrought. And the thing is that with respect to leadership, we have done the same.

We have introduced dynamics that no one can resist. And once again, we all are compelled to tolerate the new order, from wherever it is imposed. We take on the attitudes of the new definitions of leader and follower that have developed such terrifyingly fashionable momentum. We mouth the requisite formulae, answer the new incantations, and perform the carefully crafted, symbolic liturgy. And we do it willingly, we believe it. Because we have no real choice.

Whether we are left to determine if we wish to tolerate our leadership regime, or they are ultimately forced to submit to prevailing elite views of their proper roles and behaviors, we all ultimately find ourselves acting out someone else’s reality, and distorting our own. Not least among these distortions is our deepening misapprehension of what it all means. Including what leadership really means, and what are our roles and obligations with respect to it.

But you might ask, of course: has it ever been otherwise? And in any event, what are we do about it? We – employees, directors, shareholders, venders, partners, customers, innocent bystanders – managers? We will begin to take a look at that soon. Please stop in and let us know what you think!

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Today’s tip: Speaking of being alert to what we are doing to ourselves, please see what Steve Roesler has to say about the act of noticing. You will be directed to an eminently worthwhile video, and you will want, as always with Steve’s posts, to pay attention to the conversation taking place in the comments.  Please be sure to vote for Steve’s blog as the best leadership blog for 2009, as well.

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Technorati Tags: international, law, legitimate, legitimacy, leader, follower, work, organization, rhetoric, reality, intervention, Labor relations, community relations, employee, health care, leadership, director, shareholder, partner, customer, manager, Steve Roesler

We noted yesterday that international law has traditionally held that if a government is tolerated by its people – that is, if they do not rise up and remove it, however bad it may be – then it must be viewed as fundamentally legitimate. Our interest with this idea on these pages is with how it relates to leadership.

There are a couple of ways that looking at the issue from this perspective helps us better see the difficulties with the general concept of individual leadership in the modern world of organizations. One is that the centuries-old principle of tolerance legitimizing whatever form of governance we’re confronted with is, unfortunately, sound.

As long as those of us within organizations put up with the hair-brained stunts – even the ill-intentioned scheming – of those in charge, then they will largely be successful in representing their antics as legitimate leadership. It doesn’t matter whether we are employees, and thus presumed to occupy the role of followers, or even directors, expected to fill the same function in the form of the leader’s Praetorian Guard.

If we lack the will, wit, or wherewithal to resist the misguided or self-aggrandizing imprecations of our “leadership,” then the dynamics will dictate that it is best for all of us to acknowledge it as such, slip submissively into our respected harnesses, and accommodate ourselves to our fate. We will show up in force for all public demonstrations of devotion and pride, cry out our Great Benefactor’s name with joy and hope beaming from our faces, and we will mean it.

The regime will proclaim its inestimable efforts and accomplishments on our behalf, its foresight, wisdom, and enlightenment, and we will believe it. So will many outside observers, who will help spread the Word.

There will be order, predictability, unity. We followers will have our basic needs met, our higher needs assuaged. We will understand and willingly interact with our leaders. They will use us as a living canvas on which to reveal their ever unfolding vision. We all have a net advantage from the cost-benefit equation.

Stability. Tolerance. Legitimacy. What could go wrong?

We’ll look at that tomorrow. Please do stop by!

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Today’s tips: Speaking of tolerating self-deluding decline, please see these NYT pieces, here and here, commemorating the 40-year anniversary of the moon landing – by comparing the vigor and greatness of that day with the sclerotic degeneracy of our own.

Please also be sure to stop over to Nick McCormick‘s “Joe and Wanda on Management Blog” to help celebrate his 200th post – great fun, important information, and even a prize – don’t miss it!

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Technorati Tags: international, law, government, legitimate, leadership, perspective, individual leadership, organization, tolerance, governance, employee, follower, director, function, leader, Praetorian Guard, foresight, wisdom, enlightenment, observer, order, predictability, unity, vision, NYT, Nick McCormick