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"After a five-year study of of leadership covering virtually all sectors of American life, we came to the inescapable conclusion that judgment regularly trumps experience. Our central finding is that judgment is the core, the nucleus of exemplary leadership. With good judgment, little else matters. WIthout it, nothing else matters."

-- Warren Bennis and Noel Tichy for The Wall Street Journal

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“The preservation of a democratic civilization requires the wisdom of the serpent and the harmlessness of the dove. The children of light must be armed with the wisdom of the children of darkness but remain free from their malice. They must know the power of self-interest in human society without giving it moral justification. They must have this wisdom in order that they may beguile, deflect, harness and restrain self-interest, individual and collective, for the sake of the community.”

-- Reinhold Niebuhr

I suppose the trick is to have leaders who will use all that wiliness not for their own enrichment and that of their cronies, but for the good of the community. I think Republicans are more given to imagine themselves as being wily operators who must play and manipulate people and democratic institutions for the Good, but their failing is that they are all too given to the natural inclination to conflate that Good with their own personal good. At least Dubya, Rove, Cheney, and Gonzales make it easy to think so.


(Source: David Brooks for The New York Times)

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