ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We learn and grow through “reflection on experience,” as my friend and mentor Warren Bennis teaches. This book is a summary of three years of reflections on my experiences and the experiences of the many friends whom I cite in its pages. I also wish to thank those men and women for providing sterling examples of lives well led. In particular I wish to thank Larry Fisher for his thoughtful, detailed, and immeasurably useful critique of an early draft of this book. I feel about his contribution to the book the way I imagine the prolix novelist Thomas Wolfe felt about the contribution of his editor, Maxwell Perkins—that is, one step above gratitude, one short of co-authorship.

My dear friends Keith and Sheena Berwick provided unflagging support throughout the whole authorship ordeal, Sheena teaching me useful lessons about Dante and writing, and Keith providing access to the marvelous Crown Fellows and keeping channels of communication open to the Aspen Institute. Along the way I subjected Erin, Kerry, and Marilyn O’Toole to too many versions of too many chapters, cruel tests of their love and patience, both of which I shall endeavor to reciprocate appropriately. Ed Lawler, my boss at the Center for Effective Organizations, also earned countless credits for patience and forbearance, for which I am deeply appreciative. My agent, Jim Levine, is both a prince and a rock, as everyone who knows him will attest. Zach Schisgal and the cast and crew at Rodale were a joy to work with; I thank them for their professionalism. Finally, I hope Douglas and Philip Adler will be pleased to find evidence of the lasting influence of their father in this highly personal reworking of the Aristotelian lessons he taught to me and to several generations of Aspen seminarians.