Leadership and politics overlap. I generally try not to take political positions on this blog to make it accessible to more people, but the push to increase surveillance and erode protections like habeas corpus seem enough like ineffective leadership that I feel compelled to cover them. In response to this article stating that Congress granted the president the authority to arrest and hold individuals accused of terrorism without due process[…] Keep reading →

Independence Day is one of the holidays I like to take time to think about its meaning. Today I’m thinking about the U.S. Bill of Rights, as timely today as ever. Why are they as important today as ever? They limit the power of government. It seems unchecked governments tend to try to seize more power. That doesn’t mean they’re bad or the people in them are bad. Just that[…] Keep reading →

I write a lot here about how counterproductive judging others or imposing your values on them is for leadership or influencing them. (Here are five posts on it, for example: Instead of calling something right, wrong, good, or bad, consider the consequences of your actions, What is morality?, On the counterproductivity of motivating people with guilt and blame — aka moralizing, Talking about “truth” or “reality” always confuses things, How[…] Keep reading →

I’d like to look at some headlines from a leadership perspective. I don’t intend for today’s post to be political. Governments have needed secrecy and spying since before Sun Tzu’s The Art of War over two thousand years ago. People will also oppose governments that overreach their influence into their lives. Different people oppose different levels of intrusion so that the more a government intrudes the more people will oppose[…] Keep reading →

I’ve read a few articles recently how people are using search engines that track you less than Google in light of the spying. I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for a while since I find Google so spooky. Nobody is challenging in Google’s dominance, but competition is increasing. Its search results aren’t as good as Google’s, but I prefer it, as I’ll explain. Nearly every successful company has a strategy or it[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on “Mental models and beliefs: an exercise to identify yours.” If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.] This series covered a lot about flexibility with your beliefs — the ability to try out believing something new and letting the new belief crowd out[…] Keep reading →

Comparisons to Nazis and Hitler happen all the time, usually backfiring on the people making the comparison. Since almost no one has tried to take over the world or kill everyone they could based on religion, whomever you’re comparing looks better. This comparison makes things so black-and-white you lose the ability to learn from the past. Today we know how Nazism ended, but while it developed and grew, nobody knew.[…] Keep reading →

I once read that in the build-up to WWII, people in America were concerned that democracy would hold them back in a conflict with the nations creating strong centralized authorities. They speculated that in a war, while they deliberated, nations with centralized power would win for not having to take time making decisions. Apparently they were right, but only at the beginning. When the strong central leaders made effective decisions,[…] Keep reading →

I’m following the story of the government spying more closely than most issues and writing about it here because I see it as a failure of leadership in many ways, most importantly that the system seems to be out of control with the person in charge — the President of the United States — exercising little accountability if not outright lying. Yesterday an opinion piece in the New York Times[…] Keep reading →