As an academic I love dichotomies. They stretch the imagination, help us avoid subtly, and enhance focused debate.
My conceptual paradise is a 2 x 2 box where two dichotomies are juxtaposed. Are you in this box or that one? Then the game of trying to figure out which box you belong, “Are you in box A or box B?”, “What type of leader are you?” “Are you transformational or transactional?” “Are you inwardly directed or …

Sometimes we wonder: why is it the case that we’re so wrapped into the cultural reality, into the value system, and into the little power minuets, that we call organizational life? I’m often struck at the financial conglomerates who have on-site gyms, on-site physicians, on-site food, and on-site life–all for the sake of getting everyone involved in the immediate reality that is the organization. Indeed, organizations in these instances define not only what gets done, …

In a recent class at Cornell I heard a group of students demythologize famous leaders as part of an exercise. One of my students concluded, “I wouldn’t have wanted to work for Steve Jobs, he seemed like an S.O.B.”
Another student even took Washington down a peg and questioned how bright our founding father really was. He asked weather or not Washington’s silence hinted at tactical stoicism or if his quiet demeanor implied that he often …

In the 1920s Austrian biologist, Dr. Paul Kammerer, was conducting controversial experiments on the evolutionary process with amphibians—including midwife toads. His work challenged conventionally held beliefs and advocated the Lamarckian theory of inheritance which argues that organisms can pass acquired characteristics from one generation to the next.
His research was deemed fraudulent by American herpetologist, G.K. Noble, in the journal, Nature. He charged that Kammerer had injected his mid-wife toad samples with ink so they would …

I recently worked for a nonprofit public health organization in Belize. It was the chance of a lifetime for a college graduate who wanted to get out of the States: free housing, a livable salary, the opportunity to get involved in public health problems and solutions in a foreign country, and the chance to grow on a personal and professional level by challenging myself to live and work abroad.
I loved my first boss. She was …

Over the past two days Cornell University’s Nick Salvatore has written about two leaders Amos Webber and Nannie Helen Burroughs—two leaders who deftly fought for equality. In Salvaotre’s final installment he writes about Reverend Clarence LaVaughn Franklin.
Reverend Clarence LaVaughn Franklin, the preacher extraordinaire, began his life in 1915 in the deeply segregated Mississippi Delta. Raised by his mother, Rachel, and step-father, Henry Franklin, C. L. began attending St. Peter’s Rock Baptist in the Delta town …