The pattern: overly intense emotions We’ve all experienced someone losing their cool around us. People flip out. They scream or raise their voices. Or, alternatively, sometimes they withdraw and act depressed or powerless. They make rash decisions. They get difficult to be around, etc. Sometimes you’re the one whose emotions get out of control. Some people describe the pattern as “being emotional.” Since I say people are always feeling emotions[…] Keep reading →

Watching people on the streets of North Korea, you see a different culture than in New York City. In three cumulative weeks in North Korea I saw almost no one hurrying or seeming like they wanted to get somewhere important. I was curious if I could find a root cause. From a leadership perspective — that is, for someone who wants to motivate and lead others — how do capitalism and[…] Keep reading →

Following up on Vietnam, leadership, and the War Remembrance Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, I wanted to include some quotes by Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam war. As the BBC’s obituary noted, To anti-war protesters at the time, McNamara became something of a hate figure, an arrogant ultra-hawk responsible for escalating the war. He fully supported, Johnson’s decision to put ground troops into Vietnam in[…] Keep reading →

I came across the online notes of a symposium mentioning me at the Tate Modern on “Pervasive Animation” by George Griffin, who lives around the corner from me and whom I met in person a couple years ago. Okay, he mentioned me only briefly, but it’s the Tate Modern and he’s important. So there!

I enjoyed a show by an artist named Xu Bing at the Shanghai Gallery of Art. He created a book using only symbols so that anyone could understand it, no matter what language they spoke. The show showed the book and the four-year process he took to create it. The simple, blocky images telling a story suggested to me that taking simple, direct pictures of them would tell the story[…] Keep reading →

Within its borders, especially during an election year, the U.S. has an overwhelming voice of “we’re number one.” Outside its borders, I feel like within my lifetime the world’s perception of the country has declined significantly. You feel that loss poignantly in a country like Vietnam, which can claim having defeated the U.S. against overwhelming force. Effective leadership, I believe, has to understand other voices, even those it disagrees with.[…] Keep reading →

The number one defining property of leaders Defining property number one about leaders from leadership guru Michael Feiner (and my professor) is leaders ship. They get the job done. Nobody I know of whose paycheck doesn’t originate with fossil fuels or fundamentalist religion believes we are heading in a healthy direction for our environment. But we all respond to incentives and the incentives of our system — huge roads, low[…] Keep reading →