If you are a “leader” in any sense of the word, the ideas, stories, and quotes that follow will help you tame ornery problems, build agreements, and facilitate changes in new and better ways. You can use this book when you are negotiating considerations, calming frictions, mending fences, building bridges, or trying to inspire cooperation. You can use it as a general reference. You can scan the table of contents, find what is relevant or what interests you, jump around, read it backwards, or start in the middle. Most of all, you can use it when some specific conflict is “incoming” on your personal radar screen.
In the vast galaxy of leadership practices, the 150 ideas that follow focus on making deals, brokering agreements, and managing the inevitable conflicts that occur in politically charged circumstances. They are about communication, negotiation, problem solving, and “guerilla peace making.” The premise is simple and was best stated by philosopher, psychologist, and educator John Dewey: “Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates to invention. It shocks us out of sheep-like passivity and sets us at noting and contriving."
The book is also about politics. Leadership and politics go hand-in-hand. Politics has been variously defined as war without bloodshed (Mao Tse Tung), the continuation of politics by other means (Carl von Clausewitz), the conduct of public affairs for private advantage (Ambrose Bierce), and the art of looking for trouble and applying the wrong remedy to it (Earnest Benn). The word itself comes from the Greek “polis” meaning the city, state, or collective. It is all about all of us….together. At its core, politics is the business of making difficult choices about the transfer of power, rights, assets, liabilities, and obligations. Politics drives decisions on who gets what, for what purposes, and under what conditions. It is also more obliquely about being “politic,” which could mean that you are judicious, tactful, and sagacious or, depending on context and intent, conniving, unscrupulous, and cunning. I prefer the first set of definitions. It is time to try to restore the word to a better place.
