intelligence corps. When President Bush ordered an invasion of Iraq, Barcott was anxious to be part of the fight. But he was sent first to Bosnia and later to the Horn of Africa to hone his leadership skills. He put in 18-hour days, leaving an hour at night to e-mail Salim in Kibera and stay abreast of his nascent organization. What he found, to his surprise, were the complementary benefits he reaped from traveling these two very distinct paths at the same time. “One of the things that most impressed me about Kibera was the spirit of community and its strong identity,” Barcott writes. “A defiant pride was associated with being from the slum. The Marine Corps was also an extremely close-knit, proud community. Both worlds had their own languages. The Sheng (street slang) of Kibera didn’t translate into other parts of Nairobi; the jargon of the Marine Corps was challenging my mother’s ability to understand what I was saying.” In an environment like Kibera, the opportunities to be co-opted by shortcuts and unethical temptations were ubiquitous. “The most difficult test of that type of rare leader was if he or she could live with dignity and morality in conditions that tested core values every day,” Barcott writes. The more invested Barcott became in the Marines and in Kibera, the more stress and pressure blanketed his life. He put his most important personal relationship with Tracy, his extraordinarily patient girlfriend and the love of his life, at risk by leaving again and again for either a military assignment or a trip to Kibera. The essential question was, he writes, “Could I do both? I assumed all along that it was possible and I wanted it to be possible. I wanted the
best practices of each world to inform the other.” And there was the nagging, persistent voice inside him pushing him toward the battlefield. Inevitably, Barcott’s journey led to war. His first two assignments left him feeling ambiguous and dissatisfied. Iraq, in full fury, was the lure. He felt the weight of his life’s inherent contradiction but he couldn’t escape the inner truth. Reading “It Happened on the Way to War” feels like a sprint through a minefield of impossible choices. Yet Barcott, now 31 years old, a husband and father with a dual degree from the Harvard Business School and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, manages to illuminate the essential truth: that leaders are made,
AN AUSSIE’S BEST MATE? HIS COMPUTER Australians are the top social media users in the world, with users spending on average 7:19:13 hours per month on social networks/ blogs. Source: Nielsen, 2010
not born. And great leaders are made from the most difficult tests.
The Right Stuff Paul Sullivan tells why some people excel under pressure and others choke
W
Hal Mayforth
interesting...
hat does it take for CEOs — or, for that matter, everyone down to the lowest-ranking corporate talent — to perform at the peak of their abilities in the most pressurized situations? What enables them to keep their wits about them and demonstrate the same rational thinking and decision-making prowess that earned them their positions in the first place? What prevents them from freezing up, panicking and making disastrous decisions? Judging from “Clutch” (Penguin Books, 2010) by the New York Times
Briefings on Talent & Leadership
columnist Paul Sullivan, it is not much different from what it takes to hit a grand slam in the final inning of the deciding game of the World Series or to sink the winning putt on the 72nd hole of the British Open golf tournament. Although the book overdoses on sports examples, especially those from golf — the author admits that
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