Greatness in Leadership

From the May 2013 issue of Harvard Business Review:

HBR: As someone who’s known Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, what do you think makes a leader great?

Maya Angelou: A leader sees greatness in other people. You can’t be much of a leader if all you see is yourself.

Ungoogleable

For those who may not have children, it may be a little-known fact that Google is one of today's most essential parenting tools. Particularly when you get asked those difficult, almost-impossible-to-answer, barely-remembered-from-school questions. What causes lightning? What about thunder? When did the dinosaurs become extinct? What is the name of THAT dinosaur? Unfortunately, not all questions are googleable. Like the one my son asked me this afternoon:

The Son: Dad, why can't you buy a best friend?

Your Humble Servant:  [Puzzled] What do you mean? Why are you even asking me that question? Where did it come from?

The Son: Well, in Gumball they say "I'll be your best friend for ten bucks!"

Your Humble Servant: Ah, OK, so then you know that in the real world that doesn't happen, right?

The Son: Right, but why not? Why can't you buy a best friend? 

Ungoogleable.

Wisdom for the journey

Something I heard this weekend:

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

Reforming Nigeria's Financial Sector

Some of the world's most innovative and effective financial sector policy and regulation over the last five years has been in Nigeria, and led by Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria:

Greatness and Humanity

Reading:

Scrubbing the Furious Walls of Mikuyu

Jack Mapanje reading "Scrubbing the Furious Walls of Mikuyu", the most powerful of the poems he composed and kept entirely in his head when he was imprisoned -- "without charge, without trial" in the poem's refrain -- for three years, seven months, sixteen days and more than twelve hours: