"Solitude and Leadership"

If you want your leaders to become wiser you need to create space for them to reflect, alone and with each other.

Harris is concerned that new technologies help create a culture that undermines time alone with your thoughts, noting that “it matters enormously when that resource is under attack.”18 His survey of the relevant literature then points to three crucial benefits provided by solitude: “new ideas; an understanding of the self; and closeness to others.”

seminal book, Solitude: A Return to the Self. As Storr noted, by the 1980s, psychoanalysis had become obsessed with the importance of intimate personal relationships, identifying them as the most important source of human happiness. But Storr’s study of history didn’t seem to support this hypothesis. He opens his 1988 book with the following quote

Leadership, as Dwight Eisenhower defined it, is “the art of getting someone else to do something that you want done because he wants to do it.” That does not mean that leadership amounts to using people; like anyone else, a leader must recognize that each person is an end in himself. It means, instead, to make others embrace your goals as their own