Leadership - A discussion of traits, characteristics, and current news of leaders.

Have you seen lasting change come more from tearing down a thing or from building up its counterpoint? Does one trump the other in a city dying for lack of transformation? Tom Melohn said … One way to encourage people to take risks is to reward them for it.”

Picasso, on the other hand advocated tearing down a thing,  before you can build up anything new. Completely tear it down, he insisted. Where do you stand? Do the most effective leaders you know, build up a thing, or do they tear down old structures, before they get revolutionary change?

The question might have crossed Joe Klein’s mind, when he accepted the Rochester’s Business Person of the Year Award last week at the Convention Center. Joe accepted the award and then attacked NY State and Rochester city leaders for "destroying our business community and residents". 

A prominent and well respected CEO at Klein Steel,  Joe, landed his company on Rochester’s top 100 businesses for 10 years in a row.

"I'm ashamed to live in Rochester and ashamed to live in New York state," he said Thursday in an interview. Joe’s cutting words are still buzzing all over today, as seen in NYCO’s blog and The DragonFlyEye blog and in many area newspapers and TV clips. 

The Special Business-Award-of-the-Year event, drew a record crowd of more than 1000 people to the Riverside Convention Center to hear E. Philip Saunders, founder of Sugar Creek Stores, Genesee Regional Bank, and several other New York business ventures. Guests also got an earful from Joe Klein at the dinner they paid top dollars to attend.

Here is my question: When it comes to the desperate changes needed if Rochester business is to survive, what’s best? Is it better to build up or tear down, in order to shake up new life?

Which one can move the Rochester, New York business community from it’s basal ganglia of corruption and stagnation, into it’s working memory, where renewal stands a chance to generate new seeds for growth? What do you think?

It looks like the bad guys lost another one.

Today, a federal appeals court  rejected defense arguments that WorldCom Inc. founder Bernard J. Ebbers was deprived of a fair trial.  That means the fraud conviction stands.  That means that "the once-brash mogul" will likely spend the rest of his life in prison.

The decision puts Ebbers in the same jail-time fraud category as Enron's Lay and Skillings and former Tyco International Ltd. (TYC) CEO Dennis Kozlowski.

CEO's take note. THe ruling included this sentence.

"It may well be that all but the most trivial frauds in publicly traded companies may trigger sentences amounting to life imprisonment."

Power, pride and greed are the enemies of true leaders but are a seductive temptress.  The penalties for flirting have been raised.

Read more at the Washington Post.

I hope, as Mathew Stinson noted, that the change in the Fed leadership is not lost in the


After all, back in October when Ben Bernanke was announced as the replacement for Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, the New York Times noted that Bernanke would become the “most powerful economic leader in the world.”

Greenspan’s shoes will be tough to fill. I am sure many said the same in 1987 as Greenspan took the helm from Paul Volker in 1987. But Greenspan has had an unprecedented run.

Greg Ip, from the Wall Street Journal wrote,

I opined in an earlier post regarding Time magazine's choice for Persons of the Year. Clearly the Gates’s and Bono demonstrated leadership throughout the year in their respective fields of expertise (software and music) but won the award for their humanitarian effort and their ability to engage so many in their causes.

There are of course a few cases in 2005 where so-called leaders, failed and I hope something to learn from each. Local, State and Federal governments’ response to Hurricane Katrina was an example of failed leadership and really where this blog got its start.

Leaders find their way to positions of power in many ways. How they use that power often defines them. While many leaders have power, power is not leadership. Power often accompanies the position and is an external symbol. Strength, on the other hand, relates to the character of a leader, rather than his position. Strength is internal. Leaders typically use power to motivate people through fear, while strength leads people through inspiration.