John McCain, United States Senator from Arizona, died on August 25, 2018, a little more than a year after being diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive, and always fatal, type of brain cancer.
Senator McCain’s life could have been much different then it turned out to be. He grew up in a very elite and privileged world, and one that afforded him the opportunity, if he chose, to live for himself. Senator McCain didn’t do that.
If my dad were still alive, he’d turn 90 next month. That sounds really old to me, but I am reminded that he and my mom came to parenthood later in life, after he’d almost finished his veterinary degree and after several years of heartbreaking miscarriages, the last of which almost killed my mom.
After Dad and Mom realized they wouldn’t be able to have biological children, they still wanted a family, so they decided to adopt children and love them as their own. (more…)
The first relationship that children will – or should – experience leadership (both as a role and as a role model) is with their parents.
In our society, many parents have abdicated this leadership role – in spite of having experienced it, albeit imperfectly at times, themselves as children – in favor of being friends with their children.
This is unquintessential leadership at a core level (it is also parental neglect) and it, just as quintessential leadership aims to grow quintessential leaders as its legacy, produces a new generation of unquintessential leadership that is even worse than the one before it.
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My dad was the first quintessential leader I encountered in life. He wasn’t perfect – none of us are – but who he was and how he lived his life was anchored to the principles of quintessential leadership.
In the years since Daddy’s death in 1998, I’ve met and or reconnected with many people who knew my dad well and one of the things I’ve consistently heard about him was that he was a good man, a kind man, and a gentle man with an open heart ready to serve and open ears and time ready to listen. (more…)
My dad was the first quintessential leader I encountered in life. He wasn’t perfect – none of us are – but who he was and how he lived his life was anchored to the principles of quintessential leadership.
In the years since Daddy’s death in 1998, I’ve met and or reconnected with many people who knew my dad well and one of the things I’ve consistently heard about him was that he was a good man, a kind man, and a gentle man with an open heart ready to serve and open ears and time ready to listen. (more…)
I recently have been going through the essays that George Orwell wrote.
I read these essays in college, b
ut now they seem to have deeper meaning now as I look at the world and I look at us – those of us who claim to be leaders but who are not, having stolen the title with nothing to back it up, and those of us who are striving to be quintessential leaders, committed to that goal, and, yet, as mere humans often falling far short of it – and I see more of the things that get in our way, even if we are committed and trying, and if we’re not, what we can never overcome. (more…)
