4. The obesity is a national health crisis, one that—quite literally—weighs on us all. It costs lives. It costs dollars. And in the context of our current health-reform debate in Washington, it’s time we took action, as a nation and as individuals, to address this cost. While infectious disease was a disaster threatening our grandparents’ generation, chronic disease is killing us and harming our well-being—and obesity is the root cause. The growth in obesity is strongly linked to heart disease, hypertension, and the explosion of diabetes that our country is currently experiencing.
5. The context of leadership is changing, and the historical emphasis on hard power is becoming outdated. In modern companies and democracies, power is increasingly diffused and traditional hierarchies are being undermined, making soft power ever more important. But that does not mean coercion should now take a back seat to persuasion. Instead, there should be a synthesis of these two views. The conclusion of The Power to Lead, stresses a combination of hard and soft power, which is called smart power, is the best approach.
6. For Emily Dickinson there are three worlds, and she lived in all of them, making them the substance of everything that she thought and wrote. There was the world of nature, the things and the creatures that she saw, heard, felt about her; there was the “estate” that was the world of friendship; and there was the world of the unseen and unheard. From her youth she was looked upon as different. She was direct, impulsive, original, and the droll wit who said unconventional things which others thought but dared not speak, and said them incomparably well. The characteristics, which made her inscrutable to those who knew her, continue to bewilder and surprise, for she lived by paradoxes.
