The Five Things That Make a Leader

The amusingly named Hillbilly PhD blog has a post on the five qualities of leadership:

Don't let circumstances control your behavior
Be persistent
Assess yourself honestly and thoroughly
Learn from failure
Follow your purpose.

This is my condensation of his entries. As with all such lists, easy to say, harder to do -- he cites leaders like Lincoln and Gandhi, people who stand out in history for a reason. For the full discussion of these, head to his site. He says he'll focus on these characteristics for some time to come.

Michael Fitzgerald

Michael Fitzgerald writes about innovation and other big ideas in business for publications like the New York Times, The Economist, Fast Company, Inc. and CIO. He’s worked as a writer or editor at Red Herring, ZDNet, TechTV and Computerworld, and has received numerous awards as a writer and editor. Most recently, his piece on the hacker collective the l0pht won the 2008 award for best trade piece from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. He was also a 2007 Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellow in Science and Religion.

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