Much is written of how leadership and related management attributes and strategies can contribute to success in the business world, and these can be expanded to address societal challenges. Effective and authentic leadership is needed to deliver societal outcomes that respond to the urgent need to transform food systems under climate change. We need a new vision for leadership in the context of food systems research, which includes strategic goals of ‘looking out’, ‘getting different’, and ‘focused experimentation’. As part of this new vision for leadership, key cultural attributes include diversity and inclusion, a ‘service from science’ ethos, creativity, independence, and accountability. Implementing such strategic goals and cultural attributes must be complemented by systems leadership capacities. Such capacities include the ability to see the larger system, listen actively, adapt and learn, recognise and respect different stakeholders’ worldviews, and operate with a sense of purpose and authenticity.

The De re publica contains a sophisticated strain of reflection on the place of the honor motive in a good life, and in particular in the good life of public service. Cicero finds a way for a conscientious public servant to be interested in receiving honor while still directing his actions at the public good and that only. Further, he finds a use for merited honor and merited shame in the moral education of citizens and political leaders. The chapter argues that Cicero’s account of how honor motivates a person, both ordinarily and in the normative case, is fundamentally more similar to the views on honor put forward by the Hellenistic Stoics than it is to the tripartite model of psyche used by Plato in his Republic. As so often in De re publica, what we have is Platonism filtered through and modified by subsequent Stoic thought. But Cicero’s own experience in politics has also given stimulus to his reflections; and conversely, the philosophical position on honor that he develops in his writing becomes part of his self-representation as a public figure.

A central feature of human societies is the continued reliance on individual leaders as decision-makers, particularly at the national level. In the vast majority of cases throughout human history, in major societies these leaders have been male. Even in the age of the electronics revolution, when decision-making could potentially be through mass participation, the United States has moved closer to an imperial presidency and the leaders in China and India, the most populous countries in the world, are male and have become more dictatorial. The evolution of centralized individual male leadership is discussed in this chapter as arising from the development of a surplus and the emergence of private property. These developments led to wealth concentration and group-based inequalities, with the leader being a member of the power and wealth elite. Some animal groups practice collective decision-making, but for the most part decision-making in human societies continues to rely on individual (often older) male leaders.

Chapter 8 examines the ethics of community – a dominant value of the hippie movement – and points to the differences between the people who live at The Farm and those who left it. Notwithstanding, this chapter reveals the power of what may be described as the cement of powerful shared experiences in early life in forming a lifelong bond that remains stable and offers a strong psychological sense of community regardless of physical distance and frequency of contact. This chapter also highlights the challenges of community life and examines them vis-à-vis perceived advantages.

The revelation that David Foster Wallace voted for Ronald Reagan caused surprise among Wallace’s readers, many of whom had seen Infinite Jest’s Johnny Gentle as an excoriating parody of Reagan’s persona and politics. While Gentle is undoubtedly a partial caricature, Wallace’s connection to Reagan, and indeed the concept of political leadership, is more complicated than it might first appear. In his essay on John McCain, Wallace uses Reagan to outline a difference between two political personae, suggesting that the first figure, a “leader,” whatever their moral foibles, has the ability to “help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.” The second figure is a “salesman,” whose “ultimate, overriding motivation” (despite having the charisma of a leader) is “self-interest.” During Wallace’s career, his position on Reagan’s status gradually changes from the former to the latter, and this transition illuminates an important shift in both Wallace’s politics and the subjects of his writing, one particularly evident in the increased focus on “civics” in the later fiction.

Central to this shift is the short story “Lyndon,” which I argue is partially an analogy for Reagan’s second term and his response, or lack of response, to the AIDS crisis. The story is also, crucially, a dramatization of the death of “New Deal” politics and the steady encroachment of neoliberalism, this latter famously becoming the subject of intense critique in Wallace’s later writing, especially The Pale King, which is itself set in Reagan’s second term. Through a discussion of “Lyndon,” Infinite Jest, The Pale King and the McCain essay, and concluding with an analysis of Wallace’s unpublished short story “Wickedness” that features a dying Reagan, I argue that Reagan comes to stand as perhaps the figure of single widest-ranging importance to understanding the politics of Wallace’s writing.

There is an increasing recognition that non-technical skills, such as teamwork, communication and interpersonal competencies, provide the foundation of any cardiac surgery program. Understanding the human and psychological factors at play can help teams make the transition from good patient care to excellent patient care. This chapter will focus on those human, environmental and cultural factors that can be leveraged to optimize team performance with a focus on perfusion practice.

In a democracy the people are said to lead. And yet within Australia’s liberal democracy, the people elect individuals to represent them. This sets up a unique role for political leadership. Debates about leadership churn are especially relevant in Australia given the number of political leaders that were replaced in the decade following the 2007 federal election.

Understanding the friction between leadership and liberal democracy provides us with a deeper grasp of our institutional setup. In considering political leadership in Australia, this chapter begins by considering the tension that exists between leaders in liberal democracies and the democratic institutions they work within. It then outlines some of the theories about leaders and leadership. It goes on to investigate and discuss Australian political leadership by considering the different types of political leadership in Australia. Following this, debates about recent leadership failure and supposed ‘poor leaders’ in Australia will take place. This chapter also deals with questions related to structure and agency as well as the political leadership gender gap in Australia.

These articles represent a wide array of reporting in the Black press on social activities within the Black community. “Society” pages and local gossip columns provide an invaluable window into experiences of community life – including births, deaths, literary functions, and activities organized to support and sustain the papers themselves – that were, otherwise, rarely written into the historical record. For instance, readers sometimes turned to Black newspapers for help in locating missing family members. Contenders for leadership in Black organizations frequently criticized one another in the newspapers. Music and social dancing played a central role in coverage of community organizations. Dance parties could be celebrated as dignified and joyful or denounced as disreputable or unworthy. The interest that White compatriots took in Black dancing and music could be grounds for jubilation – signs that racial prejudice was eroding – for criticism of lax club leadership, for debates about whether to allow White men to attend dances in Black clubs, or for concern over performances of Carnival groups that reproduced harmful stereotypes.

In one of the splendid essays brought together in his Personality in Politics, published just after World War II, British politician and civil servant Sir Arthur Salter speculates about why the USA failed to ratify the League of Nations Covenant, the brainchild of US President Woodrow Wilson. First, Sir Arthur suggests, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a one-time supporter of the idea behind the League, was embroiled in “bitter personal enmity” with Wilson, for reasons that have long remained unclear. Sir Arthur suggests that Lodge’s support could have made a decisive difference: it would most likely have resulted in further support by seven more senators, which would have been enough to secure the required two-thirds majority in the US Senate. But the personal relationship between Lodge and Wilson was such that this never happened.

While the crucial role of language for leadership is generally acknowledged, there is often a perception or expectation – especially among professionals, but also among many business and organisational scholars – that language is merely a tool that can be used strategically to enhance leadership performance and effectiveness. This chapter challenges this view by outlining that language does much more than that, and that it is in fact central to the notion of leadership itself. Developing a greater awareness of the relevance of language for leadership, this chapter calls for the need to pay more attention to the language of leadership, and to engage more productively with linguistic research on leadership.

When Milton Obote was inaugurated as Uganda’s first prime minister in 1962, the future of the country that Winston Churchill had called ‘the Pearl of Africa’ looked brighter than ever. Independence from Britain had come with a carefully constructed federal constitution that gave some internal autonomy to the ancient kingdom of Buganda and its king, while Obote and his government could still maintain effective control of a country with diverse ethnic and interest groups.

Independence brought democratic institutions at a time when the economy was booming. The ‘cash crop revolution’ involving cotton and coffee that started with the construction of the railway from Uganda to the Kenyan port at Mombasa in 1901 had spread rapidly during the following half-century. In the first decade of independence, coffee exports more than doubled.

Over the last 40 years, spending on both hospital and physician services in the United States has inexorably increased, often faster than gross domestic product (GDP) or any other aggregate measure. In contrast to industries such as computer software, hospitality, sports and recreation – where spending has also grown faster than the economy – health care spending growth is not thought to be matched by increased customer or patient satisfaction or improved outcomes. For some groups, especially those that are socially disadvantaged or lower income, measures of health have remained stubbornly lower relative to the rest of the population. Despite continuous criticism of the status quo and calls for transformation, little has changed. Why has this sector of the economy uniquely resisted changes in products, productivity, and services aimed at improving consumer satisfaction or reducing spending growth?

The prevailing business model in which most medical practices, hospitals, and larger healthcare networks operate is a volume-based, fee-for-service model. Income to the healthcare provider is based substantially on the number of patients seen. As a consequence, there is pressure on the healthcare provider to see as many patients as possible. It is well known that such an “assembly-line, piece-rate-pay” approach is a major factor in promoting burnout. One alternative is the concierge medical practice, and in the United States this alternative is growing modestly among primary care physicians, where it is most clearly applicable. A more widely applicable alternative is quality-based compensation, though actually determining the relevant metrics of quality and administering such a system have proven problematic. As yet there is no clear-cut alternative to the fee-for-service model, but there is widespread agreement that the unintended consequences of the model are increased risks of burnout. The spike in telemedicine brought on by the pandemic shows that when changes in healthcare are seen as imperative, systems-level strategies can indeed change, and quickly.