Mentor for a General

If you could pick anybody to mentor you who hasn't yet, past, present, or future, who would that be and why?

Wow. You know, somebody who went through an extraordinarily difficult time of getting elements to work together. I think of an Abraham Lincoln, I think of a George Washington during his first and second terms in the White House, I think of people who had to navigate very contentious times with maturity, with wisdom, but not with knowledge, because very few of them had the right answer. They were always searching for the right answer, but the ability to pull people together, to bring the disparate views, to get something that can work...

That's the kind of person that I would love to have whispering in my ear. Because as soon as you think you've got the right answer, you're sunk. Because that surety, that overconfidence, that arrogance is, in my mind, self-defeating. It doesn't mean you should lack confidence in life or lack confidence in yourself or conviction to a cause, but it means that once we think we got it all figured out, we are almost certainly going to be disappointed.

That is just such a powerful concept. Somebody who's not afraid to challenge the status quo, somebody who can inspire a shared vision, somebody who doesn't have all the answers because it's in the middle of a transformation.