One of the columns I follow in the
New York Times is in the Sunday Business section, called "The Corner Office". This column prints interviews with CEOs - always focused on their insights on leadership.
This past Sunday, I saw an interview with
Drew Gilpin Faust. Though not explicitly linked to international scholarship, it's worth reading.
A couple of excerpts...
I think the most important leadership lessons I’ve learned have to do with understanding the context in which you are leading. Universities are places with enormously distributed authority and many different sorts of constituencies, all of whom have a stake in that institution.
One of the things that I’ve thought a lot about with Lincoln is how he dealt with people. Partly what Doris Kearns Goodwin has written about is at the heart of this, which is a team of rivals, bringing different people together. But what I take from that effort is that Lincoln would not allow someone to be his enemy. You just were hard-pressed to be mad at him, because he’d be after you, again, in a way that used his power, his charm and his intelligence to bring you around, to be an ally. So I’ve thought about that a lot, as I’ve thought about the politics of the university and having to deal with people who might disagree with you, who might not like your decisions, to not let that turn into enmity, but to always bring people back around to being contributors.
