Leadership Lessons

One of my opportunities in college in the early 80’s was to partner up with a young political refugee from the Soviet Union. Sergei [not his real name] was brilliant in math, extremely tough, and utterly naïve about the US. My role was to help him get around when he wasn’t in classes and answer his questions about life in America. He’d been shown Depression-era films showing soup kitchen lines and old cowboy movies and told these were the current horrible conditions in the US. Initially he felt certain that the grocery stores in Cleveland were CIA fabrications because there couldn’t possibly be this much meat and fruit available for ordinary citizens. I noticed that he stole furtive glances around as we walked in the city, concerned that he was being watched. Sergei was a wild mix of confidence and anxiousness.  [Read more…] about Leadership Lessons from Sergei