Good Times in Rome

The trailer for "Suburra."

Nazi "Ethics"

Nazi educators appropriated the Golden Rule to mean . . . love your ethnic comrades so deeply that you would willingly die for them. In a handbook for Nazi teachers, Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative - "Act only on that maxim which you would wish to become a universal law" - was described as "the only conceivable basis for collective life" because it praised "a spirit of mutual assistance" and condemned egotism. A slogan summed up Nazi morality: "Treat your comrade as you would like him to treat you." From there it was only a short step to the assumption that noncomrades were not human. A Nazi lecturer implicitly exempted Jews when he told pupils, "Treat your fellow humans the way you wish they would treat you."

- From The Nazi Conscience by Claudia Koonz

Execupundit note: Be very wary of any practice that implies a person is not really a person.

Weekend Leadership Reading

Wally Bock has assignments for us.


[Photo by Greg Kantra at Unsplash]

Novels for Leaders

Virginia Politics

Quick Look

The trailer for "Genius: Picasso."

Business Attire

A question asked and answered regarding the wearing of ties in the British House of Commons.

Trains and Snow

Two documentaries from Britain:

• "Snowdrift at Bleath Gill"
• "Snow and Trains."

Learning from Policy Governance

The Policy Governance Model developed years ago by John Carver and Miriam Carver is a very savvy way of fostering positive relationships between a non-profit board and the organization's Chief Executive Officer. A key part of the process is that the board sets Ends policies stating where and what it wants the organization to be but then it also sets Executive Limitations polices describing what it wants the CEO to avoid doing. As a result, the CEO has a lot of running room. The board sets policy and the CEO executes that policy without micro-management by the board.

Carry that concept into life and you have your goals, a grasp of what you want to avoid doing, and then enormous flexibility as to how you will achieve your goals. The "refrain from" part can be as important as to the "to do" part.

I'd add a caveat. Refraining from negative or harmful behavior can prevent crises that will demand a lot of time and effort merely to restore the status-quo.  The doing, however, is what will move the organization (and you) forward. Preventing disasters and scandals is a great good but each day the question must be: how have we moved forward?

First Paragraph

It was the summer when the price of a small loaf of bread topped a million rubles.

- From Icon by Frederick Forsyth

[Photo by Nikolay Vorobyev at Unsplash]