Sublime

“But the best me—that’s a little more important.”

All of these have roots in a sense of not having mattered enough to anyone over long childhood years.

That makes this volume profitable not solely for scholars and educators, but for leaders and managers themselves: it is a guide for creating a learning-based and leadership-nurturing organization similar to Heifetz’s classroom setting.

A similar study was conducted at Italy’s Bocconi University, on twelve hundred first-year students who were randomized into introductory course sections in management, economics, or law, and then the courses that followed them in a prescribed sequence over four years. It showed precisely the same pattern. Teachers who guided students to overachieve

Yet appearing authentic while conforming to external values produces for the self-creating self an endlessly contradictory task of reconciling incommensurable values. How does this self, caught between a newly expanded sense of interiority and faced with an increased demand that it shape itself for the marketplace, render itself “authentic”?

As Charles Taylor puts it, in modernity we remade the human person into a “buffered self,” protected and autonomous and independent, free to determine our own good and pursue our own “authentic” path.

The impossibility of finding one’s “authentic” self is mitigated by the possibility of accessing, at least, one’s most persuasive self. One does not need to be an authority if one can appear authoritative.