Excellence and Leadership in a Democracy (Classic Reprint) - Hardcover

Stephen Richards Graubard

9780331441246: Excellence and Leadership in a Democracy (Classic Reprint)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0331441241 ISBN 13: 9780331441246

Publisher: Forgotten Books, 2020

View all copies of this ISBN edition

0 Used

2 New

From US$ 37.58

Excerpt from Excellence and Leadership in a Democracy

The aligning of individuals with one or another of the two camps sur prised me no less than the very emergence of those camps. I was young, and experience had not yet taught me one thing: that the most fallacious of all the operations of the mind is to calculate in advance a man's or a woman's reaction to a really unforeseen ordeal. We are almost regularly mistaken when we claim to solve such a calculation through applying psychological data already acquired, thus prolonging the logic of the known character of past life. Any ordeal is new and every ordeal finds a man who is also new.

In no country have as many volumes on the subject of leadership appeared as in the United States. The reading of most of them is a dismal, when it is not a ludicrous, experience. They dissert at length on the necessity for candidates for leadership to make friends, to co ordinate, to get things done, to lead the strenuous life once dear to Theodore Roosevelt, to learn how to conduct conferences. The last item must be a source of considerable embarrassment to many men of affairs: for they are laboriously advised to decorate their confer ence rooms with irenic green, also favored by insane asylums. To promote togetherness through calling every one by his first name; to devise well-planned recesses, during which background music should be played softly; not to hang modern abstract art on the walls, for it makes uneasy those who don't know what the garish splotches mean. Data are then gathered to prove that, among other attributes, leaders enjoy a taller stature than ordinary mortals. Bishops average inches, but preachers in small towns only university presidents rise to a inch average, presidents of small colleges have to be content with sales managers average inches, salesmen a mere Shades of Napoleon, of John Keats, of Stalin, who never reached the height of even a sub-salesman or of a dean of a very insignificant college!

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.