limits or logic. Life on this turbulent, complex planet is no
longer linear and sequential, one thing logically leading to an-
other. It is spontaneous, contrary, unexpected, and ambiguous.
Things do not happen according to plan, and they are not re-
ducible to tidy models. We persist in grasping at neat, simple
answers, when we should be questioning everything.
Wallace Stevens, a renowned poet who was also vice presi-
dent of an insurance company, put it nicely in his poem, “Six
Significant Landscapes”:
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses—
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon—
Rationalists would wear sombreros.It’s time for America to trade in its square hat on a sombrero,
or a beret, and consider this new context.
And as Norman Lear put it, “One person can matter... a
citizen can matter in this country.”
Today, the opportunities for leaders are boundless, but so are
the challenges. Our best and brightest are as smart, innovative,
and capable as any generation of leaders has ever been, but the
route to the top is more arduous and trickier than it has ever
been, and the top itself is more slippery and more treacherous
than Everest ever was. But reaching the top is not the only
Mastering the Context