Leadership

When former Yale University professor William Deresiewicz delivered a lecture at the United States Military Academy at West Point in 2009, he never anticipated the response it would generate. Since then, he has received requests to use his lecture from the Army Command and General Staff College; the Naval War College; the Air Force Weapons School; the Defense Department's Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation; the Army's University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies; the business schools at Stanford, the University of Chicago, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of California, Irvine; the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health; King Saud University; Zayed University in Abu Dhabi; the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad; and Whirlpool, Boeing, Verizon, Alcatel-Lucent, and United Technologies. The speech even elicited a note of appreciation from General David Petraeus. Here are the words that inspired so many.