Wanderlust on April 24, 2007 at 10:11 AM

Try this: If one has to attend a leadership conference to learn how to be a leader …
It is a gift, just like a good voice is for singing.
Just like a good voice can be used to sing crud or to sing beauty, leadership can be used to lead others into good or into evil.
If one doesn’t have “it,” even 100 conferences aren’t going to make it appear.
;P

naliaka on April 24, 2007 at 11:52 AM

I cling to the old-fashioned notion that all talent needs to be nourished. Whether that talent is leadership (and yes, it can be taught; I believe you are confusing leadership with charisma) singing, cooking, language, mathematics whatever.

What a conversation.

Spoken like someone who equates success in life by the amount of money one earns. Hopefully you aren’t married to anyone in the military, because they earn pennies on the dollar compared to their corporate peers. Just ask Darlene Druyun (former undersecretary for acquisition, US Air Force). I suppose military leaders aspire to be lords of the boardroom when they retire, to prove their leadership skills?

So when do you “go Diamond!”, honora? Dexter Yager is looking for someone just like you.

(oh, and any references to the writings of e.e.cummings aside, honora, it’s customary to capitalise adjectives when one is discussing the principle of that adjective in the superlative sense; your interpretation of the practice as [presumably] paternalistic, condescending, and/or patriarchal says quite a bit about you as the interpreter in this instance)

Wanderlust on April 24, 2007 at 10:11 AM

I was married to a military man. Leadership IMO exists in all kinds of environments. And in my experience, people who denigrate financial success are trying to convince themselves that it is somehow dirty and ignoble (really quite a leftist POV!!!)

Here’s a little secret I am happy to share with you: I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Rich is better.

Try this: If one has to attend a leadership conference to learn how to be a leader …
It is a gift, just like a good voice is for singing.
Just like a good voice can be used to sing crud or to sing beauty, leadership can be used to lead others into good or into evil.
If one doesn’t have “it,” even 100 conferences aren’t going to make it appear.
;P

Well me and Iococca and Jack Welsh and Bill Gates and Sam Walton and just about all highly successful company leaders. Consensus building–golly, let’s avoid that at all costs. LOL. Spoken like someone who has never been inside a board room.

honora on April 24, 2007 at 9:45 AM

Spoken like someone who equates success in life by the amount of money one earns. Hopefully you aren’t married to anyone in the military, because they earn pennies on the dollar compared to their corporate peers. Just ask Darlene Druyun (former undersecretary for acquisition, US Air Force). I suppose military leaders aspire to be lords of the boardroom when they retire, to prove their leadership skills?

So when do you “go Diamond!”, honora? Dexter Yager is looking for someone just like you.

(oh, and any references to the writings of e.e.cummings aside, honora, it’s customary to capitalise adjectives when one is discussing the principle of that adjective in the superlative sense; your interpretation of the practice as [presumably] paternalistic, condescending, and/or patriarchal says quite a bit about you as the interpreter in this instance)

Honora’s leadership seminar hosts teach a brand of leadership that lives (and dies) upon consensus building and management.

Well me and Iococca and Jack Welsh and Bill Gates and Sam Walton and just about all highly successful company leaders. Consensus building–golly, let’s avoid that at all costs. LOL. Spoken like someone who has never been inside a board room.

When that time comes, a true Leader will keep walking towards the Good, looking forward with both eyes, knowing that if others choose to follow, their needs will be met because their desire to follow is a choice they made on their own.

I just love the capital letters. I assume this is to help your readers identify the really important words–which says something about how you see your readers. That’s the kind interpretation.

Well, not to be picky, if you’re not being followed, you really aren’t leading, right? Or not leading very effectively.

Number one rule of any sort of leadership training I’ve attended over the years–if you and the people you are supposed to be leading aren’t on the same path, don’t waste time asking yourself if it’s you or if it’s them.

It’s you.

honora on April 23, 2007 at 4:41 PM

Well, it’s about time I climbed onto this crazy ship. I used to enjoy Allah back in the days of his pauperhood, when he ran his own blog. I aspire to attract as many fatwas as he did.

Meanwhile, I’ve been following honora’s squidging (is that a word?) about this thing called “leadership.”

Her latest post follows logic that plays well in a corporate boardroom, or perhaps the US State Department.

But that’s as far as it goes. No further.

Honora’s leadership seminar hosts teach a brand of leadership that lives (and dies) upon consensus building and management. It’s the way of “leadership” that the EU or a Commonwealth country follows. Go to Europe, Australia, New Zealand, or Canada, and such “leadership” models are followed to the point that they become a quasi-religious creed.

And “leadership” by consensus management requires a “one eye forward, one eye backward” mindset: after all, if you aren’t being followed (so the seminar leaders teach), you aren’t “leading”.

My moral hero William Jefferson Clinton “led” the US that way, for eight years. Yet while “leading” with one eye looking behind, he missed the thread that was woven through the WTC bombing, embassy bombings in Kenya and Sudan, Khobar Towers bombing, the Oil for Food $$$ fiasco, overt links between Saddam, the UN, France, Iran, Hezbollah, HAMAS, the Muslim Brotherhood, and al-Queda, to name a few.

But I’m not one to note failures without also mentioning successes. Clinton, that able leader, taught all of us in management positions how to lead by opinion polls (in the corporate world, we call them “employee surveys”).

Clinton also gave us the Gorelick Wall, that lovely separation of Church and State in the intel world.

He taught a generation that even something as inspiring to the Left as the cause of Feminism could be sacrificed if there were more pressing matters at stake. For years, Feminists fought the good fight to rid the world of the once-popular belief that if a woman was raped, well, “she must have asked for it”. After the Clinton Leadership seminar (1992 – 2000), we learned that Flowers, Brodderick, Lewinsky, et.al., surely must have asked for it.

Which, in a roundabout way, brings me to my point.

Leadership, in the truest sense, is based firmly in one’s aspiration to achieve good things for no other reason than because those things are morally good to do.

Hopefully, others will be inspired to follow. If they do follow, the thing they are following is less the person than the cause, the good thing, to which the leader aspires.

It is this desire to aspire to a moral Good that marks a leader because this desire runs completely contrary to human nature. Morality at its purest desires to do good things because they are good.

I could go on, but I believe the point is made.

honora’s seminars taught her that leadership is succesful if others follow. This model is flawed – broken, if you will – because we can easily determine how to get people to follow us by pandering to their needs, desires, and/or fears. Yet there comes a time where choosing to do the right thing, the morally good thing, runs contrary to the choices people want to make.

When that time comes, a true Leader will keep walking towards the Good, looking forward with both eyes, knowing that if others choose to follow, their needs will be met because their desire to follow is a choice they made on their own.

And even if no one else follows, a true Leader will keep on going, because it’s the right, good thing to do.

I’ve done my part to help.
The Therapist on April 23, 2007 at 3:20 PM

Be sure to let us know how much you get for it. 3 bids as of this writing–23 cents! Go, Therapist, go! LOL!

My mind-eyes are bleeding.

Instead of toilet paper, we use The New York Times. If it was good enough for our grandparents in their privies, it’s certainly good enough for us now.

I don’t think I could do that to my posterior. Wipe it with something filthier than what just left it?

There’s Sheryl Crow’s laughable and impending, Oops-it-was-a-botched-joke, “One Square Per Visit” hypocritical riot…But the real news of the day was Harry Reid’s backtracking on his “Lost War” statement….

Instead of toilet paper, we use The New York Times. If it was good enough for our grandparents in their privies, it’s certainly good enough for us now.

Just remember, you’re not exactly dealing with Socrates or Einstein … you’ll find evidence in these quotes.

thirteen28 on April 23, 2007 at 2:43 PM

HOLY CROW, Batman! No wonder Rove didn’t want her to touch him, he was afraid her stupid might be contagious.

I wonder how much they sell.

- The Cat

MirCat on April 23, 2007 at 4:03 PM

Can I get these in basic brown for Meatloaf Monday, Tan for Taco Tuesday, etc.?

I think war is never the answer to solving any problems. The best way to solve problems is to not have enemies.”
-Sheryl Crow

From what I can gather she was really bad at solving problems.
B Moe on April 23, 2007 at 6:03 PM

Clearly. If her theory is that the way to solve problems is not to have enemies, she just screwed up big time by making an enemy of Rosie’s a** !!!

“I think war is based in greed and there are huge karmic retributions that will follow. I think war is never the answer to solving any problems. The best way to solve problems is to not have enemies.”

-Sheryl Crow

A friend of mine worked for her very briefly back in the day. From what I can gather she was really bad at solving problems.

You think they would sell poop offsets?
Matticus Finch on April 23, 2007 at 5:24 PM

They’ll sell any kind of offsets that stupid people would be willing to buy.

If Crow were to have her brilliant suggestions implemented, we can all look forward to higher incidences of typhoid, dysentery (ameobic & bacterial), hepatitis, even the resurgence of polio since it hasn’t been knocked out as hoped, and so on and so forth.
naliaka on April 23, 2007 at 5:29 PM

I commented on another blog that maybe Crow’s intention with these idiotic and unsanitary ideas is to bring back diseases that would wipe out some portion of the human (particularly American) population, thereby saving the planet by reducing the human scourge on the environment. But she’s not nearly smart enough to hatch such a devious plan.