Sublime

Nothing is stable in the realm of power, and even the closest of friends can be transformed into the worst of enemies.

"I am a legend," he told a group of foreign investors at a dinner speech in March 2001 shortly before his appointment to head the Economy Ministry. The power of his intellect, his incorruptibility, and the sincerity of his desire for his country's well-being were undeniable; the only question was whether he had a sense of proportion about himself.

Sullivan believed that our struggles were interactional (meaning “relational”). He went so far as to say, “It’s the mark of a senior clinician that he or she is the same person in their living room that they are in their office.” We can’t teach patients to be relational if we aren’t relational with them.

“Richard has the part of my brain I don’t have,” he said. “Richard is a philosopher type,” said Rajeev, who had brought them both into the White House. “He’s good at putting things into a bigger context. Carter is good at putting things into a smaller context.”

The reason is, in order for communication to be effective, it has to create what’s known as common knowledge, which is a string of embedded knowledge—you know, if you have two individuals, and I need to know that the other is going to show up to protest, the other needs to know that I’m going to show up to protest, and I need to know that he knows

The psychologist Jerome Bruner distinguished between two different modes of thinking, which he called the paradigmatic mode and the narrative mode. The

A system that follows only the impulses of compassion and solidarity [love] will lose its competitiveness; a system that follows only the impulses of resolve and purposefulness [power] will sacrifice its people heedlessly and risk its capability for growth and recovery. A mix of power and love, however, becomes a stance that a leader can hold, and

According to Mark Lipton, a professor of management at the New School, stark bullying, tantrums, and other behaviors associated with nine-year-olds commonly intersect with high-level vision, leadership, and prestige. Many CEOs behave so badly, he said, that they exhibit classic symptoms of psychopathology. “What saves them,” Lipton told me, “and I