Recruiting Animal

A Bossy Leader

From: The New York Times (edited)

Ms. Quinn summoned Ms. Gotbaum to an office nearby and, with little warning, began shouting at her in increasingly angry tones about appearing weak in front of other lawmakers.

“You were like Bambi in there!” Ms. Quinn exclaimed, slamming her hand on a table for emphasis...

As she pursues a high-profile bid for mayor, Ms. Quinn, has proudly promoted her boisterous personality, hoping that voters will embrace her blend of brashness and personal charm.

But in private, friends and colleagues say, another Ms. Quinn can emerge: controlling, temperamental and surprisingly volatile, with a habit of hair-trigger eruptions of unchecked, face-to-face wrath.

She has threatened, repeatedly, to slice off the private parts of those who cross her.

She is sensitive to slights: When a Queens councilwoman neglected to credit Ms. Quinn in a news release, the speaker retaliated by cutting money for programs in her district.

Ms. Quinn’s staff, concerned that angry tirades could be overheard by outsiders, added soundproofing to her City Hall office. Wary of her temper, they are known to ask one another: “Did she throw up on you today?”

 

Manage Your Family Like a Manager

From: The Wall Street Journal (edited)

In 1983, Jeff Sutherland saw  how dysfunctional software development was. Companies followed the Waterfall Model in which ideas flowed from the top to the bottom.

So he designed an Agile Management System in which ideas would also percolate up from the bottom.

It worked so parents started taking the idea home with them.

The Starr family was exhausted by the earsplitting environment of their home.

Eleanor Starr: "I was trying the whole 'love them and everything will work out' philosophy but it wasn't working. I finally said, 'I can't take this any more.' "

So they started using the Agile Management program from husband David's work in which teams hold daily progress sessions and weekly reviews.

"The meetings transformed our relationships with our kids—and each other. And they took up less than 20 minutes a week."

Water, water all around

From What kind of Buddhist was Steve Jobs, really?

One story that really struck me regarding his non-pragmatic nature was the selection of the color for the beige case of the Apple II.

There were 2000 beige Pantone colors to choose from and Steve did not find any of them acceptable and demanded a custom beige be created.

This strikes me as mental illness, a grave lack of clarity and misunderstanding of simplicity and harmony.

Another Comment

Steve Jobs’ greatest kindness was to die young and leave a compelling legend strongly resilient to his inconvenient humanness.

He will be missed by the multitudes and wished good riddance by many who knew him well.

An Excitable Leader

From: Glenn L. Carle, The Evil Genius of Fidel Castro

... it was Castro who urged Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to launch a nuclear war against the U.S. in response to the deteriorating situation that the Cuban dictator had engineered.

“Castro suggested that in order to prevent our nuclear missiles from being destroyed, we should launch a preemptive strike against the United States,” Lattell writes, quoting Khrushchev’s memoirs, which are backed up by quotes from Cuban defectors and other Russian officials.

One shares the horrified reactions of successive Soviet officials to the man they called their “excitable,” communist ally, who was apparently willing to see us all killed to serve his ego.

Only a megalomaniac would vehemently argue for Armageddon so that he could survive in a bunker, the revolutionary hero presiding over an irradiated hemisphere.

But then, in Lattell’s account, this is Castro through and through: a sociopath from early manhood, who in the barrios of Havana after World War II, gunned down rivals, shooting them in the back from a distance.

See: Thirteen Days  and The Missiles of October: Part 1 - Part 2 and Defcon 2: The Cuban Missile Crisis - Declassified: The Cuban Missile Crisis

American Leaders

From Peter Hitchens: A Louse vs A Flea (edited)

My interest in US politics has been fading ever since I lived there, and saw it at first hand.

But it sank to near-zero during the last Presidential election, when the Obama campaign became a show business frenzy, devoid of reason and much more like the early, screaming years of the Beatles than like a bid for office

As Clarence Darrow once said ‘I was told as small boy that anybody could become President of the United States. As I grew older, I realised that this was absolutely true’.

Neil Young's Management Style

From: The American Conservative

Young is a sort of passive-aggressive Little Napoleon who either dominates everyone around him, or leaves.

Crosby, Stills and Nash were the most popular band in America before Young joined, but Young immediately called the tunes -- even though he was manifestly putting most of his effort into his solo career. "

As soon as they started to rehearse," recounts Young's business manager, "It was clear Neil was gonna be in charge. Everyone was afraid of Neil. Because Neil walked."

Young prefers working with mediocre musicians like Crazy Horse who can't afford to walk out on him.

One of Young's producers observed, "He doesn't wanna play with really good musicians because they'll bust him.

Because he's not an amazing musician -- he's just an amazing force. So, it's always safe with guys that are less than you -- you just tell 'em what to do and you know they'll do it."

A Good Executive Communicator

From Quora: What is Sheryl Sandberg like as a person?
 
From: Yishan Wong (edited)

Sheryl has good people skills.  When you meet with her she will make you feel like you are having a real conversation.  Many executives check their blackberries, take calls or just appear distracted because they have a lot on their minds. 

I once had a purely social meeting with her. It was scheduled for only 30 minutes.  Her schedule had been delayed so we didn't start until 12 minutes in. Normally, you can't have a substantive conversation in that amount of time. 

However, upon entering the room, she settled comfortably into the chair, asked me how I was doing and we had great, high-quality conversation for the next 18 minutes.  We still ended on time and I left impressed by her ability to focus on the person she's with in spite of being stretched so thinly on time.

The other comments are flattering as well.

Rajeev Sharma (edited)

I found her very approachable and friendly.  She's not outwardly gregarious and I would say she's a bit reserved, more of an observer.  She is obviously someone who gains respect by giving respect.  A decent, personable and attractive person.

Elyn Lee (edited)

She was incredibly personable. She treated us like we were all good friends, almost like we'd known her for a while. She was very open to hearing our opinions. She gave us really great advice without sounding in any way like she didn't care about what we were saying. She related our experiences to those of her own and it really made me feel comfortable talking with her.

 

Holier Than Thou Hypocrites

Is making money helping others wrong?

Kelly McParland says The Toronto Star is quite ready to turn its own employees into victims while it makes money posing as an organization that cares about them.

Having worked there for a short time I understand that its obsessive search for victims and automatic alignment with any left-wing crank out there is as much a business model – a search for profits – as it is adherence to the famous Atkinson principles of which it boasts.

You think the Star sympathizes with struggling salaried workers? Try being on the other side when it negotiates a contract, lays off staff or tries to squeeze senior people into quitting so it can replace them with cheaper youngsters.

Here's where Kelly goes wrong. If the paper can't make a profit it can't defend victims. So the employees have to bite the bullet. The same would be true for a charity. It makes sense to me.

Let Us Not Praise Famous Men

It's not good to exaggerate the significance of a title because titles often hide the real person behind them.

Below: from Slate (edited)

President Morsi has famously been known to intimate that 9/11 was an inside job, but the closest Americans have ever come to mass protests against this denial of one of our greatest national tragedies was an indignant op-ed by a pair of excitable Egypt-watchers.

Back in 2005, when Morsi was running for re-election to parliament, I often heard him talk about how American women routinely don’t know who their babies’ fathers are, and how hospitals have accommodated this sad fact of American life by simply registering newborns under their mothers’ names.

This little bit of color merited an amused footnote in my thesis, and I thought nothing of it for half a decade until I saw that, according to a writer for Foreign Policy, Morsi was still saying the same thing in 2011.

When Morsi became president, he used the occasion of his first big public address to promise to work for the release of a man convicted of trying to blow up the World Trade Center.

How did the United States respond? It sent its secretary of state to Egypt to cheerlead for Arab democracy and open a new consulate, where she was pelted with tomatoes. She did not demand, nor did she receive, a public apology.

 

Question For David Frum

I left this on David's Facebook page:

Dave, I saw you speak at the Holy Blossom Temple before the Iraq War.

It was a big night for you. A packed house and Robert Fulford gave you an Incredible introduction and greeting - yet I felt, later, that you misled us with your confidence about Iraq's readiness for change and I've wondered how you felt about what you said after the invasion went awry.