“The Power of Leadership”

Continuation of Thoughts from Ari van der Steenhoven, Vapro International, a reader from Shanghai, China. (Source: TIME)

No Charisma? Don’t Worry, You Can Still Be A Leader!

Persistence Pays Off. Try, Try and Try Again.

It was Winston Churchill who once enjoined an audience to “never give in; never, never, never give in,” and he knew whereof he spoke. Churchill spent the 1930s in the political wilderness, warning of the need to rearm against the Nazi threat, and was treated as a bit of a joke by smaller men.

Michael Mandelbaum of the the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University says resistance in the face of adversity is a key quality in a leader. He cites Thatcher, whose sheer bloody determination saw off a hostile intelligentsia, a party that sometimes treated her with all the condescension the British once reserved for clever women, and entrenched interests that fought her economic and social reforms. Before he became Prime Minister in 1996, Australia’s Howard had been turfed out as leader of his own party, and when asked if he might ever lead it again, he said such an event would be like “Lazarus with a triple bypass.” Howard then went on to win four general elections.

Wirth praises Ban Ki-moon for the same quality of persistence. The U.N., Wirth says, gets dumped with the problems that great powers can’t solve, like nudging the regime in Burma into improving its miserable human-rights record or bringing peace to Darfur in southern Sudan, where bitter fighting raged for years. The U.N. had long been unable to come to any consensus on how to handle Darfur, with deep divisions in the Security Council about whether and how to send a peacekeeping force there. Wirth praises Ban’s diplomatic skills in finally getting Security Council approval for a joint U.N. – African Union peacekeeping force for the region.

“Don’t be afraid of going slowly. Only be afraid of standing still.” … author unknown.

Have A Good Day!

Russ

Performance Institute – A Global Leader in Human Capital Development

Russ M. Miller, LLIF
Sunny Hong Zhang, Managing Partner – China
Shawn M. Miller, Managing Partner – USA

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