friends, army buddies, business pals. But sometimes they make
history, as with FDR’s brain trust, Eisenhower’s general staff,
John Kennedy’s Irish Mafia, the Bloomsbury writers, and the
Bauhaus designers.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, Jr., directed what has been called
the most exclusive club in the world at Los Alamos, New Mex-
ico, in the early years of World War II. Oppenheimer said of
the scientists who gathered to develop the atomic bomb, “It
was a remarkable community inspired by a high sense of mis-
sion, of duty and of destiny... coherent... dedicated... and
remarkably unselfish... devoted to a common purpose.”
Former Johnson & Johnson CEO Jim Burke told me of a
very different but equally remarkable group of friends, all of
whom achieved extraordinary success in business: “My six clos-
est friends in the world all became close friends at Harvard
Business School. I think I have more close friends than most
people, and I made most of them there. A lot of it came out of
the bonding of our values. We also were alike in wanting to
work very hard, and we were all excited about the opportunities
to do something with our lives.... Our lives are all wound up
with each other. There is in fact a value system that runs
through us all, and we view the world in identical terms. On
top of that, we have a helluva lot of fun.”
LEARNING FROM ADVERSITY
Study, travel, people, work, play, reflection, all are sources of
knowledge and understanding, but so, curiously, are mistakes.
John Cleese, who, in addition to his memorable comic turns in
movies and with Monty Python, writes and produces equally
On Becoming a Leader