This piece was first delivered to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point in October 2009. It’s a really marvelous piece of thinking that I find myself returning to whenever I need to reset my professional or personal compass.

Here’s a quote:

We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going.

Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place.

What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of exper­tise. What we don’t have are leaders.

You can read it in its entirety here.

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