Blog about Leadership

One of the best principles that all leaders follow is that you can learn from anybody. When I was in the military, I worked for a Chief Warrant Officer, who told me that you learn from all types of authority – you either learn what to do or what not to do. You can learn what works and what doesn’t work. You can figure out what you like and you don’t like, but the key point is that you are observing and learning from other leaders and then applying what you learn in your own practice.

This is true on the small scale as well as one an international relations stage. Mikhail Gorbachev observed what Ronald Reagan used to describe the Soviet Union and used those descriptions to help push through reforms of Perestroika and Glasnost in the 1980s.

As much as the Western world may detest and deplore Osama bin Laden, if we want to succeed in the struggle with terrorism (which is more a struggle of the minds than a struggle of battlefields) we have to observe and learn from the terrorists as well. Osama bin Laden described his viewpoint of power by saying, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.”