98 Leading with NLP
Empire.^6 He was a remarkable leader by all accounts, a
professional revolutionary who had little previous fighting
experience yet in the space of two years created an under-
ground movement made up of over 200 committees in
towns and villages throughout Bulgaria. It was a kind
of state within a state, with its own police force, postal ser-
vices, official archives and, remarkably, audited accounts.
Although Levski has been romanticized by his countrymen,
he seemed to have all the leadership qualities – a vision of a
free country shared by his fellow countrymen, the ability to
inspire others in dangerous circumstances, and a great
grasp of strategy and tactics in battle. Levski was against
Turkish rule, but he also built up a community of resistance
fighters. The Christian Church was his ally and monasteries
used to hide him, often in specially built secret caches. He
was killed in 1873 and the Turkish rule of Bulgaria was over-
thrown in 1877.
He is reputed to have said, ‘If I win, I win for the whole
people. If I lose, I lose only for myself.’
References
1 See Morton Deutsch, Distributive Justice: A Social-psychologi-
cal Perspective, Yale University Press, 1985, and Kenneth
McGraw, ‘The detrimental effects of reward on perfor-
mance’ in M. Lepper and D. Greene (eds), The Hidden
Costs of Rewards, Earlbaum, 1978, and, for a good sum-
mary of the evidence, Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards,
Houghton Mifflin, 1993.
See also Crystal Graef, The Overcompensation of American
Executives, Norton, 1992. This book exposes how top ex-
ecutives are rewarded whatever their success (or lack of
it) in a company.
2 See John Pearce, William Stevenson and James Perry,
‘Managerial compensation based on organizational per-
formance’, Academy of Management Journal, June 1985