Timeless Leadership Principles

The perimeters of personal honor and integrity are of great interest today, especially in politics. In another lifetime, I taught leadership to the midshipmen at the Naval Academy in Annapolis.

In conjunction with my boss, Capt. John J. O’Connor, who later became John Cardinal O’Connor, the Archbishop of New York, I developed a curriculum to not only teach leadership to potential warfighters, but bedrock moral and ethical principles as well.

We sought to produce junior officers who took care of their people and “did the right thing” as a matter of course. Here are just four of the points we made, updated with anecdotal examples from my own experience.