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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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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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.

http://www.rcadvisor.com/ founder - Home of the best model airplane calculator. Free!

Author of RCadvisor's Model Airplane Design Made Easy and other books.

Host of Ask the RCadvisor in the free weekly The Crash Cast podcasts.

AMA Scientific Leader and Contest Director #4601.

Are You Finally Interested in Losing Weight? The Resolution That Will Work!

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Lose It! The Personalize Weight Loss Revolution [Softcover]

by Charles Teague and Anahad O'Connor

206 pages, $21.99

ISBN-13: 978-1605290942

Nonfiction

In the era of the smart phone, it seems that new applications are released nearly every day. Some applications, such as Rovio's wildly popular Angry Birds, promise to steal countless hours of your life with very little offered in return. Slinging birds via slingshot into the skeletons of buildings is alluring to many-but will not do anything for you health. In 2008, Charles Teague sought to change that.

He released an iPhone application which would help people manage their weight. Hugely successful, the LoseIt application has been downloaded by over 6,000,000 people. Today, the Lose It platform can be downloaded for use on the iPhone, iPad, Android, or used online. If you own one of these devices, or have access to the World Wide Web, you have the ability to lose weight and keep it off for good. The Lose It solution works because it is based upon a time-honored principle: you must burn more calories than you ingest to actually lose weight. You enter the weight you want to weigh and you are provided with a calorie maximum for each day (and are even told when you'll reach your goal based upon your plan for losing weight.)

In the book Lose It! The Personalized Weight Loss Revolution, Charles Teague and Anahad O'Connor explain why the LoseIt application has been so successful. The LoseIt philosophy is based upon five pillars:
Embrace mindful empowermentTrack your caloriesTrack your habitsTrack your exercise as negative caloriesBenefit from peer support

The novelty of the program is the fourth pillar: Track your exercise as negative calories. When you use Lose It, you keep track of all calories ingested. The caveat is that any calories you burn while doing exercise are automatically deducted from your daily log as negative calories. It doesn't take the user long to figure out that losing calories from your log has a dual benefit: not only are you exercising-you're also able to ingest those negative calories and remain under your maximum for the day.

The Lose It! book helps dieters understand caloric intake and gives visual clues to help you understand how many calories you might be ingesting. For example, three ounces of cooked fish is about equal to the size of one's palm. Additionally, the book helps the novice by providing an exercise guide with plenty suggestions on how to burn more calories. Remember, calories burned can be eaten.

The most compelling chapter of the LoseIt book would have to be the one entitled, What's Your Type: Identify the habits that are holding you back. In this chapter, the authors illustrate why a one-size-fits-all diet will not work for everyone. In this chapter, this writer discovered he is the consummate weekender - logging calories fastidiously until the weekend, and then letting the logging go. LoseIt reminds you: a calorie is a calorie. Want to burn off a pound? Burn 3500 more calories than you've eaten and, yes, you will lose a pound.

Written in an easily read, narrative style, the Lose It! book is commended to anyone trying to lose weight. In the book, you will find the philosophy behind the LoseIt application; plenty of dietary information to help you; and a variety of personal testimonies of individuals who have lost over 100 pounds and have kept it off. If you like online forums, you will not be disappointed, either-there are numerous individuals who log on to LoseIt's virtual forums to discuss exercise strategy, swap recipes, and give each other motivation.

Slinging virtual birds into the meager structures to watch them cascade to the ground will not help you reach your fitness goals. LoseIt will: buy the book and download the program. After all what do you have to lose...

...except maybe the weight you've been wanting to lose all your life?

Review by Steven King, MBA, MEd

The Most Bloody Romp of All

It is hard to find something truly glorious in war, hard, but not impossible. This man was glorious, and it took a terrible war to make him so.

Once in a while you bump into something a bit special that has somehow not gathered the spotlight it should, and this WW1 autobiography fits the bill with bells. Massive loud bells. GUNNER SUBALTERN 1914-18 (published by Leo Cooper of London) by Julian Tyndale-Biscoe consists mainly of letters to his father, not published until 1966 and details a romp through apocalypse. This artillery officer's remorseless cheerfullness while his friends are cut down around him can only be admired, though at times it surely went a long way to placate his father's fear. His survival is a miracle, and there are, in my print anyway, a succession of poignant photographs of his friends who did not. A.C. Cooper is a case in point, gradually shot to bits through the war, photographed by the author in a Dublin fete, armless sleeve pinned to his Sam Browne belt, smiling in the sunshine and already itching to get back. He 'died as a result of being gassed'.

Most people the author describes are 'wonderful fellows', though he targets the fools and maniacs with cutting wit. They all live in the 'lap of luxury'. The experience of spending a night waist deep in freezing water under fire hardly fazes him...though he and the trooper with him had to keep lifting one foot at a time out to keep some feeling going...actually it is hard to know where to start with his experiences. He blithely describes crawling over smashed body parts, wading through gore and the remains of his dear friends, watching German trenches being obliterated by his guns five yards at a time, their occupants flung up as each salvo erupted, then an encounter with an fellow officer left enthroned after a shell hit the officers' latrine, who told him 'It's lucky that shell arrived when it did as I was feeling a bit constipated'. The sheer bravado of it all is breath-taking.

In the Ypres Salient (Toms Dog they called it) during one action they lost a third of their officers. His reaction was that it could have been a 'lot worse'.

He got shot, blown up repeatedly, suffered terrible ailements including dysentry, and still found the energy to set up spoof targets so that HQ would have to get up early (he narrowly escaped courts martial for that little jape) and fills at least a tenth of the book with descriptions of who he met at mess and where he managed to scrounge a meal. His attitude to rank was fabulously blase, and his descriptions of private soldiers and NCO's contains the same respect and honour as anyone from his own 'very middle class'.

It is undoubtedly a book about war, but gradually you realise it is a brilliant and vibrant snapshot into a world that by 1918, largely ceased to exist. Of finding ways round orders that officers should not hunt their chargers in Ireland, of knocking on a general's door simply because someone else sent a letter of introduction, and expecting to be asked to tea. Of laughing in the face of endless danger and violence because that was what your country and your companions expected. Eventually, the sheer bloody minded determination to remain of good cheer in the face of a great and terrible (and endless) experience is in itself the most moving element. I am not ashamed to admit I came close to tears during his description of The Somme, how a very near shell burst became so common-place they 'merely inclined our heads towards the burst, so our tin hats would take the odd bullet'. The officer he was talking to said calmly 'I'm hit', and duly expired. As did the battery clerk. That evening he could find no casualty return forms so instead used an equipment list form: "It seemed cold-blooded, indenting for a subaltern and battery clerk, to replace those 'destroyed by shell fire'."

My copy is inscribed by JTB himself, and he has added in pencil 'MC' after his name. The inscription is to 'George', Jan 1972. He died in December the next year, aged 77. What a character. What a story he tells.

It is, with the exception of 'Good-bye to All That', the most powerful account of that dreadful war I have ever encountered, and I came to it by sheer chance. I recommend this wonderful bloody romp to all those interested in things military and the men who carried (or directed) the guns...recommend it most highly, energetically and with due enthusiasm, as JTB would have said.

Book Review of "Death in The West: Fatal Stories From America's Last Frontiers" by Chris Becker

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Death in The West: Fatal Stories from America's Last Frontiers. [Soft Cover]

by Chris Becker

224 pages, $16.95

ISBN-13: 978-0873588935

Nonfiction

Review by Steven King, MBA, MEd

Diving into underwater caverns, scaling insurmountable mountains, or defying natural consequences of exploration, Americans are attracted to anything that produces a thrill. The adrenaline rush causes our hearts to beat faster and our spirits to soar. Adrenaline junkies are seldom satisfied unless they are defying death.

Whatever your vice for an adrenaline rush-do not strap yourself into a lawn chair and tie 45 helium-filled balloons to it. Your intention might be to rise to the top of the trees but you might find yourself spotted by airliners at 16,000 feet instead. Larry Walters, or Lawnchair Larry, as his neighbors in San Pedro came to know him, did just that in 1982. Unless, of course, you desire to be arrested - just like Larry was when he landed.

Becker writes of stories such as this in a powerful way to show where the odds catch up to thrill seekers. For every success, a handful of people die. It is unfortunate to be caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, but it can also have deadly consequences.

Sometimes, the Grim Reaper arrives as the result of really bad choices. If lightning strikes, the best refuge is not in a rock crevice where electricity can jump across side to side and destroy what is between. It is never advisable to hike into unfamiliar territory, without a compass, map, or extra clothing, and not tell someone your anticipated route. Becker's testimony rings clear: take precautions and provisions, or your next trek might be your last.

In spite of our best efforts, however, we are totally at the mercy of Planet Earth. Natural calamities abound and chances are, if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, you might not return. Avalanches bury people, mudslides wipe out entire towns, and destructive fires burn across the landscape with apparent vengeance.

Sharks can mistake humans for natural food sources and grizzly bears can attack with little or no provocation. Mountain lions might stalk a hiker down a pathway and then attack for a late night snack. Perhaps our quest for adventure takes humanity too far into the natural habitat of the animal denizens of the planet.

A compelling read as Becker usually demonstrates how calamities could have been avoided. Reading these stories will certainly make the reader think twice before the next thrill seeking adventure.

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson - A Review

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If you've ever done genealogy, you cannot help but learn in intimate detail the history of your family and often the times in which they lived. The generation born prior to the Baby Boomers is quickly disappearing and so are their stories. Thankfully Isabel Wilkerson pursued the history of three of these people to help Americans understand the epic tale of the Great Migration of southern African-Americans, who came north for a better life.

This migration of close to six million people covered almost seventy years. Within a generation of the Jim Crow laws becoming established throughout the South, black southerners turned to the North. And although it had a confusing set of rules of its own, the North dangled a carrot of hope for all those seeking a chance for improvement. The North did not want to commingle with these poorly paid new migrants, nor did they want them to take any jobs that paid well, nor live in any housing outside the areas established for them. The North did, in fact, do almost anything to prevent their success.

Wilkerson records the journeys of three migrants from the small towns of the South to the big cities of the North and West. Her research shatters many of the pre-conceived ideas about southern black migrants. She reminds us of the courage of all those who come to America, seeking a life with more opportunities for themselves and their children.

Wilkerson weaves the first hand accounts of Ida Mae Gladney in Chicago, George Starling in New York City and Robert Foster in Los Angeles with background information of the times in which they lived. She sites new data to support her conclusions and does it all with incredible understanding and compassion. You will have a difficult time putting the book down, especially in the last hundred pages, as you become more and more attached to these real-life, fallible people.

As with blues music, which is often unacknowledged by today's African-Americans, this book may be ignored by those whose parents have lived it. Do not let the size of the book discourage you. Read it to better understand your parents and grandparents. Many of us grew up being taught American history from a white male perspective. This book makes you realize that we all influence history by example, by the way we live our lives, by what we will and won't tolerate and by the choices that we make. Learning about these three individuals proves that we do indeed have the potential of living heroic, albeit unrecognized, lives.

Copyright 2012 by Linda Murdock. Linda K Murdock is the author of four books, including two cookbooks, a puzzle book and an insider's look at the State of Colorado. She has traced her genealogy back ten generations in America and has written articles for the Colorado Historical Society. She is a blues enthusiast and an avid mystery reader. Learn more or read more reviews at http://bellwetherbooks.com/