Transcripts

Warren Bennis:
The key difference is what health psychologists call hardiness - that's h-a-r-d-i-n-e-s-s.

Warren Bennis is author of the book On Becoming a Leader.

And what that means in a nutshell is the expectation of future success - an outlook toward life which is positive and seeing the opportunities and not only the negatives. And you know as the poet Emily Dickinson once said, " I dwell in possibilities".

Every great leader Warren has looked at has had and learned from what he calls a crucible experience.

And when I talk about crucibles, I'm talking about serious things like: Mike Wallace - the Sixty Minutes fellow who lost his son when his son was twenty years of age and how he recovered from that and how that changed his life. Or Sydney Rittenberg who was imprisoned in a communist Chinese prison camp for sixteen years - we're talking about really seminal experiences which shape them. Some people learn to overcome them, to learn from them, to transcend them, to become bigger people as a result of that and other people seem to be crushed - become victims to life.

At somethingyoushouldknow.net I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.