Hi Reader, It’s a theme I keep hearing in this year’s US Presidential election: character matters. It seems old-fashioned, a throwback to another era, to talk about the leader's character. Because it seems that over the past decades, qualities like character, integrity, and honesty have taken a back seat to qualities like individuality, authenticity, and non-conformity. The current trend is to have leaders as disruptors, norm-busters, and creative geniuses who think and live outside the box...
8 months ago • 4 min read
Hi Reader, When I was 10 years old, my parents took us to Disney World in Orlando, which had just opened. That first year, eager for publicity, Disney gave out press passes to the media, which meant my father, a journalist for a small town paper, got them. And these press passes allowed us to skip the long lines for all the exhibits and rides and go right up to the front. So of course I was having a grand old time, feeling like a VIP, walking by all those people waiting in line in the hot...
over 1 year ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader, Plato hated democracy. He’d have a lot of friends today. But Plato’s hatred for democracy was for a very different reason than that of today’s critics, many of them fans of authoritarian strong men. In fact, Plato would see them as a case in point: the problem with democracy is that it caters to people’s need for easy answers. This, he believed, made them dangerously prone to demagogues. Democracy, he wrote, marginalizes the wise. It’s human nature to want the easy answer. To be...
over 1 year ago • 5 min read
Hi Reader, I can’t get Beth Dutton out of my mind. Or Kendall Roy. Which should make the screenwriters of Yellowstone and Succession very happy. They’ve created a compelling and complex cast of characters. And they also wrote stories that are just as compelling, how far someone can go, and how many ethical and moral lines can be crossed in the quest for power. Some of the most popular shows of the last few decades have themes related to power: House of Cards, Empire, Game of Thrones,...
almost 2 years ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader, Way back in the 1980s, I spent a lot of time audiotaping meetings of people. I was researching power for my doctoral studies and listened to hours and hours of conversation between coworkers in various settings: meetings, informal discussions, social events. And during this time, I discovered something that startled me. At first, it made no sense. Most of the time, the person in the group with the highest rank, spoke the least. It startled me because it flew in the face of what we...
almost 2 years ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader, It’s spring. And that means baseball season has just kicked off here in the States. And every year about this time, I’m reminded of the beloved, iconic baseball movie, Bull Durham. The film tells the story of a minor league baseball team who signs a gifted pitcher, Ebby Calvin LaLoosh, aka “Nuke.” Problem is, Nuke is immature and undisciplined, and his wild fastball is unreliable. So the team brings on a seasoned veteran, Crash Davis, to mentor him. In one scene, while the team is...
almost 2 years ago • 4 min read