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One of the most potent and enduring myths in our society is that leadership is reducible to the power of the leader. A few special individuals are blessed with special qualities that set them apart from the rest of us and entitle them to rule. As Thomas Carlyle asserted, “Universal history … is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked here.” If only we could isolate the qualities that make these leaders exceptional.

Such ideas launched numerous studies that sought to find personality characteristics that predict leadership success – none of them particularly fruitful.

such an approach misses a very obvious point: leaders only achieve anything through their followers, and “great man” theories write the followers out of history.

a blizzard of admissions jargon that I had to pick up on the fly. “Good rig”: the transcript exhibits a good degree of academic rigor. “Ed level 1”: parents have an educational level no higher than high school, indicating a genuine hardship case. “MUSD”: a musician in the highest category of promise. Kids who had five or six items on their list of extracurriculars—the “brag”—were already in trouble, because that wasn’t nearly enough.

With so many accomplished applicants to choose from, we were looking for kids with something special, “PQs”—personal qualities—that were often revealed by the letters or essays. Kids who only had the numbers and the résumé were usually rejected: “no spark,” “not a team-builder,” “this is pretty much in the middle of the fairway for us.” One young person, who had piled up a truly insane quantity of extracurriculars and who submitted nine letters of recommendation, was felt to be “too intense.”

On the other hand, the numbers and the résumé were clearly indispensable. I’d been told that successful applicants could either be “well-rounded” or “pointy”—outstanding in one particular way—but if they were pointy, they had to be really pointy: a musician whose audition tape had impressed the music department, a scientist who had won a national award.

Twitter executives deceived federal regulators and the company’s own board of directors about “extreme, egregious deficiencies” in its defenses against hackers, as well as its meager efforts to fight spam, according to an explosive whistleblower complaint from its former security chief.

The complaint from former head of security Peiter Zatko, a widely admired hacker known as “Mudge,” depicts Twitter as a chaotic and rudderless company beset by infighting, unable to properly protect its 238 million daily users including government agencies, heads of state and other influential public figures.

Among the most serious accusations in the complaint, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, is that Twitter violated the terms of an 11-year-old settlement with the Federal Trade Commission by falsely claiming that it had a solid security plan. Zatko’s complaint alleges he had warned colleagues that half the company’s servers were running out-of-date and vulnerable software and that executives withheld dire facts about the number of breaches and lack of protection for user data, instead presenting directors with rosy charts measuring unimportant changes.

the performance of presidents, especially on foreign policy, is shaped by how leaders attach to problems. Some leaders are like dogs: They want to bound right in and make things happen. Some are more like cats: They want to detach and maybe look for a pressure point here or there.

we should be asking them a different set of questions:

How much do you think a president can change the flow of world events? President Obama, for example, has a limited or, if you want to put it that way, realistic view of the extent of American influence. He subscribes to a series of propositions that frequently push him toward nonintervention: The world “is a tough, complicated, messy, mean place and full of hardship and tragedy,” he told Goldberg. You can’t fix everything. Sometimes you can only shine a spotlight.

take a reality bath. Go off and become a stranger in a strange land. Go off to some alien part of this country or the world. Immerse yourself in the habits and daily patterns of that existence and stay there long enough to get acculturated. Stay there long enough so that you forget the herd mentality of our partisan culture.

When you return home, you will look at your own place with foreign eyes. You’ll see the contours of your own reality more clearly. When you return to native ground, you’re more likely to possess the sort of perceptiveness that Isaiah Berlin says is the basis of political judgment.

This sort of wisdom consists of “a special sensitiveness to the contours of the circumstances in which we happen to be placed; it is a capacity for living without falling foul of some permanent condition or factor which cannot be either altered, or even fully described.” This wisdom is based on a tactile awareness of your country and its people — what they want, how they react. You don’t think this awareness. You feel it. You experience a visceral oneness with culture and circumstance — the smell of the street, tinges of anger and hope and aspiration. The irony is that you are more likely to come into union with your own home culture after you have been away from it.

President Trump, has called global warming a hoax, reversed environmental policies that Mr. McCain advocated on his run for the White House, and this past week announced that he would take the nation out of the Paris climate accord, which was to bind the globe in an effort to halt the planet’s warming.

The Republican Party’s fast journey from debating how to combat human-caused climate change to arguing that it does not exist is a story of big political money, Democratic hubris in the Obama years and a partisan chasm that grew over nine years like a crack in the Antarctic shelf, favoring extreme positions and uncompromising rhetoric over cooperation and conciliation.

entire climate change debate has now been caught up in the broader polarization of American politics.

Some of us are larks -- some of us are owls. But if you look at distribution, most of us are a little bit of both — what I call “third birds.”

There's a period of day when we’re at our peak, and that's best for doing analytic tasks things like writing a report or auditing a financial statement. There's the trough, which is the dip -- that’s not good for anything. And then there’s recovery, which is less optimal, but we do better at insight and creativity tasks.

the bigger issue here is that we have thought of "when" as a second order question. We take questions of how we do things, what we do, and who I do it with very seriously, but we stick the "when" questions over at the kids’ table.

Psychological research comparing women and men on measures of anger find that they are more alike than different. Men and women are equally likely to experience anger and the intensity of their anger is remarkably similar. Regardless of gender, we get angry when frustrated, criticized, betrayed, rejected, or disrespected. When someone behaves immorally or unethically it can also lead to our anger and outrage.

But anger is “gendered.” It’s perceived through gendered (and racial) lenses. While most emotion is identified as feminine, anger is considered more of a masculine emotion. Anger and its expression are contrary to traditional beliefs about women’s essential “nature” as compassionate, passive, and other-centered. Meanwhile, anger and its expression as aggression and violence, is viewed as naturally male, and masculine. “Boys will be boys,” so many people say.

Their apologies likely reflect an awareness that anger and assertiveness are generally more acceptable for men than they are for women, and that they must be careful not to appear “too emotional” as this is sometimes used to justify the exclusion of women from political leadership roles.

The conventional view is that Machiavelli believed that since people are brutes then everything is permitted. Leaders should do anything they can to hold power. The ends justify the means.

In fact, Machiavelli was a moralistic thinker.

He just had a different concept of political virtue. It would be nice, he writes, if a political leader could practice the Christian virtues like charity, mercy and gentleness and still provide for his people. But, in the real world, that’s usually not possible. In the real world, a great leader is called upon to create a civilized order for the city he serves. To create that order, to defeat the forces of anarchy and savagery, the virtuous leader is compelled to do hard things, to take, as it were, the sins of the situation upon himself.

Yet corruption is not a victimless crime. Cutting corners on good governance costs money, endangers lives and erodes the public trust that oils the machinery of state in modern democracies.

Conversely, the interior of France is largely corruption-free, some departments even entirely so. Of course, the incidence of corruption varies with the density of population, and perhaps declines disproportionately in the almost-empty interior because there are so few people to be corrupted by.

Mapping corruption at country level brings home the pervasiveness of the problem.

The recently retired chief of Israel’s internal security agency said Friday night that he had “no faith” in the ability of the current leadership to handle the Iranian nuclear threat

“I don’t believe in a leadership that makes decisions based on messianic feelings,” said Yuval Diskin, who stepped down last May after six years running the Shin Bet, Israel’s version of the F.B.I.

“I have observed them from up close,” Mr. Diskin said. “I fear very much that these are not the people I’d want at the wheel.” Echoing Meir Dagan, the former head of the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, Mr. Diskin also said that the government was “misleading the public” about the likely effectiveness of an aerial strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

There are three pernicious and interrelated phenomena at work here. First, founders are disproportionately white dudes. Second, white dudes are disproportionately encouraged to become founders. Third, white dudes are disproportionately recognized as founders.

Ultimately, this phenomenon can lead to the erasure of women and minorities in leadership roles from the picture

The research is broad and deep on the “glass walls” that keep women from becoming entrepreneurs, or the profound discrimination that many people of color face when starting their own businesses. Investors like a pitch coming from a man better than coming from a woman — even when the pitch is the same. Minority-owned firms get rejected for loans at twice the rate of white-owned firms, and often pay higher interest rates when they get them, too. 

We’ve both seen it happen again and again. When a woman speaks in a professional setting, she walks a tightrope. Either she’s barely heard or she’s judged as too aggressive. When a man says virtually the same thing, heads nod in appreciation for his fine idea. As a result, women often decide that saying less is more.

research shows, women who worry that talking “too much” will cause them to be disliked are not paranoid; they are often right.

Mr. Mazzara, the show runner, found a clever way to change the dynamics that were holding those two female employees back. He announced to the writers that he was instituting a no-interruption rule while anyone — male or female — was pitching. It worked, and he later observed that it made the entire team more effective.

Although there are plenty of grounds for rage against the big banks, the challenge is to sort out which are the activities that grow the real economy of goods and services, and which are the activities that are essentially a zero-sum game of socially useless gambling?

The situation today is that the zero-sum games of the financial sector aren’t just a tiny sideshow. They have grown exponentially and have become almost the main game of the financial sector.

When finance becomes the end, not the means, then the result is what analyst Gautam Mukunda calls “excessive financialization” of the economy, as his excellent article by “The Price of Wall Street Power” in the June 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review makes clear.

Introducing our word of the day – “manterruption”. It’s a pretty self-explanatory term, describing a behavior when men interrupt women unnecessarily, which leads to a pretty serious imbalance in the amount of female vs. male contributions in a conversation.

A 2004 study on gender issues at Harvard Law School found that men were 50% more likely than women to volunteer at least one comment during class and 144% more likely to volunteer three or more comments. 

which as a consequence leaves decision-making mostly to men.

One can argue that the preeminence of each civilization was, in part, due to their sophisticated understanding and use of mathematics. This is particularly clear in the case of the West, which forged ahead in the 17th century with the discovery of calculus, one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all time.

The United States became the dominant force in the mathematical sciences in the wake of World War II, largely due to the disastrous genocidal policies of the Third Reich. The Nazis’ obsession with purging German science of what it viewed as nefarious Jewish influence led to a massive exodus of Jewish mathematicians and scientists to America

Indeed, academic institutions in the United States have thrived largely because of their ability to attract talented individuals from around the world.

The House of Representatives approved one article of impeachment Wednesday against President Trump for "incitement of insurrection," with 10 Republicans joining all Democrats in a 232-197 vote.

She never spoke on the House floor and made it known she thought it was a vote of conscience, but her vote could potentially cost her spot at the leadership table.

Now he has a distinction in the history books that no president wants — the first to be impeached twice.

This force is unresolved grief, and research suggests it costs companies billions of dollars a year in lost productivity and performance. Our own multiyear research effort finds that unresolved grief is a pervasive, overlooked leadership derailer that affects perhaps one-third of senior executives at one time or another.

The negative impact of unresolved grief is considerable. In addition to the well-known ways that stress from grief damages our physical health, 1 1. Eliana Crosina and Michael G. Pratt, “Understanding how grief weakens the body,” Atlantic, September 11, 2014, theatlantic.com. the financial cost of grief to organizations appears high: $75 billion a year for US companies, according to one study. 2

At its most basic, our experience of grief stems from our natural resistance to change. That’s why some definitions of grief usefully describe it as “the conflicting emotions brought by the change of a familiar pattern.”

he essence of Team Obama's reelection strategy was to capitalize on their man's strength with what National Journal's Ron Brownstein calls "the coalition of the ascendant" has long been clear. Back in May, I wrote a cover story for the magazine laying out Chicago's plan to focus laser-like on four key voting blocs: African-Americans, Hispanics, college-educated white women, and voters of all ethnicities aged 18-29. At bottom, their theory of the case was that, despite the fragility of the recovery and the doubts that many voters had about Obama's capacity to put America firmly back on the road to prosperity, the deft and aggressive exploitation of coalition politics (along with the ruthless disqualification of Romney as a credible occupant of the Oval Office) could secure the president a second term. That in 2012, in other words, demographics would trump economics.

A quick glance at the exit polls confirms the extent to which the coalition of the ascendant is responsible for that performance. Contrary to the assumptions of the Romney campaign, the electorate that turned out on Tuesday was more diverse than 2008's, not less. Nationally, the share of the vote comprised by whites fell from 74 to 72 percent, while the black vote held steady at 13 and rose among Hispanics from 9 to 10, among Asians from 2.5 to 3 percent, among women from 53 to 54 percent, and among young voters from 18 to 19 percent. Obama's share of each of those blocs was overwhelming: 93 percent of African-Americans, 71 percent of Latinos, 73 percent of Asians, 55 percent of the ladies, and 60 percent of the kids. T

the challenges facing the Republican Party are far greater and far graver; indeed, it's no exaggeration to say that they are existential. Before Election Day, there were some in GOP yakkety-yakosphere who were warming up to pin the blame for Romney's impending defeat on Hurricane Sandy, a dubious proposition rendered utterly absurd by what happened yesterday. Not only was the problem not Sandy — it wasn't even simply Romney. True, the weaknesses of the Republican nominee were manifold and glaring, but they had nothing to do with the party's having squandered its chance to take back control of the Senate by pissing away two eminently winnable seats (in Missouri and Indiana) by dint of having nominated abject cretins (Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock). Or with the passage, for the first time, of ballot initiatives in two states (Maine and Maryland) legalizing same-sex marriage, and the legalizing of marijuana in two others (Colorado and Washington).