UniBrow

“How High Trust Leaders Create a Culture of Execution,” Oct. 23, 2008, Metropolitan Club, Chicago.

I’m guessing you lull them into a false sense of security over time, say the black hood is part of a best-practices-validated trust exercise, then … downsize! downsize!! downsize!!!

If Obama is the letter (words, fancy diplomas, “authored” books), then the latest representative of the spirit is Sarah Palin. Literary theorists used to say that their most abstruse prose was “writing the difficulty”–that the sentences were tortuous because there was no briskly commonsensical way of representing a complex issue. Sarah Palin, alas, talks the difficulty. She may claim, as she did in last Thursday’s Vice-Presidential debate, that “Americans are cravin’ that straight talk,” but they are sure not going to get it from the Governor–not with her peculiar habit of speaking only half a sentence and then moving on to another for spoliation, that strange, ghostly drifting through the haziest phrases, as if she were cruelly condemned to search endlessly for her linguistic home: “I do take issue with some of the principle there with that redistribution of wealth principle that seems to be espoused by you.” And words do matter, after all: it matters that our Vice-Presidential candidate says, as she did to Gwen Ifill, that “nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be-all-end-all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet.”

Seen today on a marquee sign out in front of a nearby metalworks plant: 

If you want to lead people, stand behind them.

And kick their asses!