A Changed Man
I must be on a “leadership” kick as this week ends. Yesterday I posted about leadership’s role in crisis preparedness. Today I am going to post on the effects of crisis on a leader. At a dinner the other night, my colleague mentioned the impact of the killing of Osama bin Laden on President Obama. We agreed that he had to be a changed man. In yesterday’s reading, Daniel Henninger wrote the following in the same vein:
A candidate is not a president. In the fall of 2008, after Mr. Obama won, our offices were visited by then-Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, a former anti-mob prosecutor. Asked about the Obama criticisms of the war on terror, Mr. Chertoff replied that it was impossible to overstate the sobering effect of learning the true magnitude of the threat and bearing responsibility for thwarting it. On another occasion, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who as a federal judge presided over terrorist trials in New York, was asked the difference between his understanding of terrorism then and as attorney general. “About the difference,” he replied “between what you thought you knew in the sixth grade and a post-doctoral education.”
Without a doubt, the decision to launch the Seals attack on bin Laden’s hideout and the risks that entailed changed the man. Whenever people go through their CEO transition to finally land their company’s highest office, they realize the enormity of the position. Nothing ever looks the same. The buck really does stop at that corner door. As you’ve undoubtedly heard before from Shakespeare,
“Heavy hangs the head that wears the crown.”
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