How to Tell If You’re a Natural Leader
-- by Gary Hamel, Wall Street Journal

Excerpt:


Or, "what do Mother Teresa and Jimmy Wales have in common?"

Good Grief

It's the sort of article that makes me think the established media really do deserve to die.

Jon

Jim Jones could be an example too.

Well, remember that before he became the paranoid leader of a mass-suicide cult, Jim Jones did a great deal of hard work for his community and his congregation, helping them to get jobs, start businesses, feed their families, and so on. Mother Teresa did even more for the children of Calcutta, and she didn't even cause anyone to commit suicide. As for Linus Torvalds, well... the amount of time he put into building early versions of the Linux kernel, and then shepherding Linux's later development, was phenomenal.

All Jimbo did, really, was hire Larry Sanger - and fund Sanger's project by operating a pornographic link-farm. The amount of hands-on work he's put into Wikipedia since then, aside from paid personal appearances and schmoozing, is actually less than that of the average WP administrator.

That's not to say the personal appearances and schmoozing aren't important, but comparing that to the kind of tough, dangerous, and uplifting work of someone like Mother Teresa, even if it's only by implication... well, that's obviously pretty fucked up.

Mother Teresa did a lot of personal appearances and schmoozing too, come to think of it!