Good Leaders Lead Without Deceiving Their Followers or Themselves

Most of us can't stand it when we learned that a politician, our boss, or someone in an authoritative position has been lying to us. In fact, nothing boils our blood quicker. Over the years, I have been fairly hard on those who stand up at the podium and tell us they are better leaders, claiming we should vote for them due to their leadership skills. I often laugh and think that if someone has to tell us they are great leader, then obviously they haven't been showing us or leading by example in the first place.

Indeed, what is that famous quote when it comes to politicians; "how do you know when a politician is lying? Their lips are moving." It is a sad state of affairs that we have to think like this, but perhaps the reason we do is we've been led astray far too many times by those who call themselves leaders. Of course there is something worse than a leader deceiving all of us, and that would be a sociopath or psychopath that also deceives themselves.

Now then, along this line of thinking there is a very good book I'd like to recommend that you read. In fact, it is written in simple layman's terms that anyone can understand, and it is a book that I own in my personal library. The title of the book is;

"Leadership and Self Deception - Getting Out of the Box," by The Arbinger Institute, Berrett-Koehler Publishing, 2000, 181 pages, ISBN: 1-57675-094-9.

The book explains how people lock themselves and their mind in a box and fail to understand the people around them. It's almost as if they don't care, and that their job is to accomplish the task, mission, or objectives without regards to the people involved, or the team which is to make it all happen. This can get leaders into trouble. Often leaders believe they are better than everyone else when they are not, and even if they are, that doesn't give them any advantage treating people like crap.

Often the authoritative style leadership works good in the beginning, but it also creates yes-men, and people who do not give their full potential, or volunteer pertinent information, or their full experience and observations to the cause. In this case it is the leaders fault for using their own particular style without regards to the people involved.

Thus, I think you'd be wise to read the book, it's a quick read, not more than a day and a half, with plenty of time to think in between the chapters. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.

Lance Winslow has launched a new provocative eBook on Change Management. Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank; http://www.worldthinktank.net/

Coward by Saadt Hassan Manto

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AppId is over the quota

Coward

By

Saadat Hasan Manto

This story Coward revolves around a man named Javed who is devastatingly torn between his instinctual desires and his virtues. All his life he has spent an honest and a clean virtuous life till this moment where he just is barely able to contain his desires.

The title of the story is symbolic. The story is portrayed in a sub continent society. Over here the word 'sex' is a taboo. We over here don't even accept the existence of brothels let alone people going to one. In this society there are societies within societies. In the story Javed is an "educated man who can distinguish between right and wrong". The point here is that he is educated and he for some reason has not been able to marry yet, probably due to some financial issue or like the one mentioned in the story that the woman he loved was Hindu and that would create problems. He had continuously failed relationships. He had been longing a woman's touch for some time now as most men do. The fact that "Javed's own house was quite far from this place" suggest that he is from a decent family background who take these types of behaviors as a sin. The author over here is trying to show us the ordeal the young generation goes through in this time of capitalistic society where marriages are conducted late, well at least for the male part of the society. The conflict in the young man's mind has arisen due to the society teaching us to be moral and yet at the same time there is this part of the society where there is a checklist which will endorse the young men of the society as real men. This checklist is not a written document; it is an unwritten mutual understanding to all. In the subcontinent this is the world of men, the society of men. To become a real man the man has to consume liquor, he should have tambaco wala pan in his mouth, he should have fight when his honor is at stake or just to be dominant and last but not the least and the one that makes you instantly into a real man is losing their virginity. This man is taken to be a real man. If you don't do these feats you are labeled as a coward, not just the subcontinent but throughout the world this checklist applies excluding the pan part. The author has shown this through Javed who is a victim to the society's misdoings.

Now Javed growing up in such a society where there are two sets of conflicting beliefs he is shown fighting with his consciousness. To top that he is a Muslim in the sub continent and Muslims here are puritans. The take pleasure to be a sin. Throughout his life he has been hesitant and virtues, but now his body can take it no more and his mind is being taken over by pure barbarian instincts. The Lamp is symbolizing his hesitance that he has suppressed all these years which is reminding him of his virtues and respect as he doesn't want to be discovered at the brothel, the man part in him who is labeling him as a coward and continuously reminding him of that, it is also representing the part of mind which we refer to as reason as the lamp tells him the reason as to why he has been hesitant. The light of the lamp represent the society in a way. Once he has entered that light the society will know of his doings.

The Story is being narrated by the author. We can see, feel, hear, smell and taste what Javed can. The story has been narrated from his point of view. We are actually witnessing the ongoing battle in Javed's brain with his consciousnesses. Javed is the round character in the story as he changing every moment. Unity of time place and action is seen. There are occasional flashbacks in the story telling the situation of Javed. The story does not have a chronological order as the story starts from the middle and the author then tells how the character has landed into this situation. There is a proper beginning, middle and an end.

There a two ways to look at the ending. One is to look it from the society of the men which will consider him a coward and one that is the puritan one will consider him as strong and brave to have fought with his inner self and won right at the last moment when it seemed as if he would fall into the pits of hell.

Book Review - Scale Aircraft Drawings: World War I

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AppId is over the quota

Summary

This 150 page book covers 35 World War I airplanes through the use of over 40 highly detailed "master" drawings. They are all drawn at a consistent scale of one quarter inch to one foot. As best as I could tell, all of the classic designs are included.

The book was published by Air Age, the same company that publishes Model Airplane News magazine. Although not stated explicitly, my assumption is that these drawings were all originally published in the magazine.

The Good

Wow. These drawings are a dream come true. They are incredibly detailed. Frankly, most of them are plain gorgeous. The drawings were all made with modelers in mind. They contain excellent details about each airplane's internal structure as well as showing full details about external markings. Outlines of the airfoils used are always included. Many of the drawings even contain detailed information on the layout of the instrument panel. In other words, they are all that one needs to construct a highly detailed scale model airplane.

As a bonus, detailed drawings of some of the engines and armaments (machine guns and bombs) are included in the back of the book. They were drawn to the same high standard as the aircraft drawings.

The Bad

It appears that all of the drawings have been scaled down to fit within the dimensions of the book. There is no indication given as to how much each drawing was scaled down. It would take some detective work to look up a key dimension for the airplane, such as its wingspan, and use that to extrapolate the scale of each drawing. The publisher could have saved us the trouble by including this information.

A preface to the book encourages the reader to order full size drawings from the Air Age store. I only managed to find four master drawings for sale in their store, and none were for World War I aircraft. Buying a set of drawings from them may have been a possibility in the past, but it is clearly no longer a viable option.

On average there are two pictures per airplane included. Most of the pictures are small, and the quality varies a lot. If you are building a scale model, you might have to supplement the included pictures with others discovered through additional research.

The text that accompanies the photos and the drawings is useful, but very short. Only about a third of a page is devoted to each aircraft. That is really just enough to touch the surface of what is known about these airplanes. The good news here is that it is a lot easier to find text that describes these airplanes than it is to find quality drawings.

The interior of the book is all in black and white. This means that the photographs are all in black and white, which should not come as a surprise given the time period of the airplanes. But it also means that the descriptions of colors in the external markings are all textual. It would be a challenge to accurately recreate a color only described as "dulled light green", for example.

The Ugly

Many of the drawings in the book were created by William Wylam. Mr. Wylam started producing airplane drawings for Model Airplane News in the late 1930s. That was 80 years ago! The amount of research that has gone into documenting these aircraft in more recent years is enormous. We simply know now a lot more about these airplanes than we did at the time Mr. Wylam was creating his drawings.

The end result of all this is that the technical accuracy of many of the drawings included in the book has been called into question in recent years. The magnitude of the reported errors varies a lot. Some of the airplane outlines are said to be off a little bit. Some of the registration numbers shown on the aircraft have been discovered to belong to entirely different airplanes. Other errors in his drawings are reportedly more serious.

Conclusion

I find it very hard to fault Mr. Wylam for the reported errors in his drawings. He had a job to do, and he did his best. I am told that many model airplane kits have been released over the years containing the same errors as found in the book. Hmmm. I wonder which book they used as their primary source!

I don't think these discrepancies detracted from the enjoyment derived by the kit builders from flying their airplanes. If your goal is to create a highly accurate scale model, you are well advised to supplement your research with additional sources.

Despite the warning above, I cannot imagine a serious fan of World War I scale model airplanes that wouldn't benefit from consulting this book.

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