As I noted in the last chapter, leaders are made at least as
much by their experiences and their understanding and appli-
cation of their experiences as by any skills. Norman Lear told
me of an experience he had when he was in the Air Force, sta-
tioned in Italy: “I remember decking one guy—I hit one guy in
my life before anybody hit me, in a bar in Foggia, Italy. He was
a GI making an anti-Semitic joke. And I wrote an episode of
‘All in the Family’ about it. Mike hit somebody who was violat-
ing somebody else on the subway and scared himself with his
own violence. And I had scared myself that way. I guess I see
leadership in that, but I don’t know where that comes from ex-
cept that early feeling of how do I overcome this problem of
being so much a minority and so unwanted.”
Clearly, to become a true leader, one must know the world as
well as one knows one’s self. A variety of studies, as well as the
lives of the leaders I talked with, demonstrates that certain
kinds of experiences are especially significant for learning.
These experiences include broad and continuing education,
idiosyncratic families, extensive travel and/or exile, a rich pri-
vate life, and key associations with mentors and groups.
I want to discuss the benefits of those experiences, but first I
want to get into some ideas about learning itself.
In 1972, the Club of Rome began a groundbreaking study of
learning, opening with a delineation of outer limits, which, in
its words, “narrow our possibilities of material growth on a fi-
nite planet,” and closing with a defense of “the inner free mar-
gins... which exist in ourselves and are pregnant with the
potency of unparalleled developments.”
Still relevant today, the Club’s report was published in 1979
as No Limits to Learning: Bridging the Human Gap, by James W.
On Becoming a Leader