Anytime I can include ‘sex’ in a post my stats improve for that day. And if the sex is combined with ‘leadership’ they go up even more.

I want to thank Steve Pearlstein and Raju Narisetti, who write On Leadership for the Washington Post, for offering up both sex and leadership in the same post along. See how the 11 panelists and dozens of readers responded to this question and then come back and tell me what you think.

Why do so many leaders fall prey to confusing power with sexual charisma? Do leaders face more personal temptations than the rest of us?

In this Knowledge@Wharton interview, Cathie Black, president of Hearst Magazines, explains why you shouldn’t “hide in a corner.” She also knows the value of sex and leadership and incorporates both in various forms, together and separately, in her media empire.

Hearst’s stable of 15 magazines includes some of the best-known titles in the business, including Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Harper’s Bazaar, O: The Oprah Magazine, Popular Mechanics, Redbook and Town & Country.

Speaking of leaders, here’s one who qualifies no matter how you rate her. Meet Ursula Burns, Xerox’s new CEO and see what she is doing to change its culture. Burns’s background is a long way from the typical Fortune 100 and her parent is even further away.

She grew up in ”the Projects,” a large low-income housing community on Delancey Street in Manhattan. … Ms. Burns was the middle child of three…her mother took in ironing and ran a day care center from home.

Image credit: pedroCarvalho on flickr; video credit: Black Enterprise

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There is a dangerous assumption out there that ‘leaders’ are chuck full of positive traits and on the side of the angels, but I’m here to tell you that it ain’t necessarily so. Just as leaders come in all shapes, colors and sizes they come with a wide variety of traits, not all of them positive. But it seems as if succession is tough all over.

Italian police have caught the Sicilian Mafia’s number two, the latest in a string of top-level arrests that has given the crime group that once terrified Italy problems with rebuilding its leadership.

The hero CEO who will save the company easily morphs into the imperial CEO. An intelligent, thoughtful opinion piece by Ho Kwon Ping in Singapore considers the dangers of this happening and assumes it will continue in the US—and it probably will.

The leadership of any company is critical to the success of its mission — but no one individual is mission-critical.

Yesterday I wrote Real Leaders are Fair, which means applying rules equally, but that rarely happens, especially when a government is involved and ours is no different. Consider the non-application of a federal law backed by a presidential proclamation that prohibits corrupt foreign officials and their families from receiving American visas. But business interests always seem to trump fairness.

“Of course it’s because of oil,” said John Bennett, the United States ambassador to Equatorial Guinea from 1991 to 1994, adding that Washington has turned a blind eye to the Obiangs’ corruption and repression because of its dependence on the country for natural resources. He noted that officials of Zimbabwe are barred from the United States.

Finally, on a lighter note, I found the answer given by Ask the Coach to this question to be classic.

Q: I am having a difficult time leading my team. The team members will not follow my instructions, which I am sure would make our project much more successful. What am I doing wrong?

A: What you’re doing wrong is very simple: you have simply forgotten that your team is more critical to the success of your project than you are.

Take a moment and read the whole post, I guarantee you’ll like what you learn.

And if you want more of my picks you’ll find them here.

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Are you aware of the new teaching approach in middle school English classes that gives kids a say in which books they read?

The approach is known as “reading workshop” and “…students choose their own books, discuss them individually with their teacher and one another, and keep detailed journals about their reading…”

I sent the article to my niece, who alternates between teaching and being a school librarian. She started as a teacher, was driven out of it by internal politics and unreasonable parents, got a Master of Library Science and spent a few years as school librarian and is now back to teaching.

She wrote back, “This is how I teach!  Cool!  Thanks for sending it.  It is controversial and some English teachers think I’m nuts but I love it!”

My niece, along with many others, is the type of teachers we need more of—they love reading and learning and work to pass that love on.

But there is a lot of opposition to moving away from the way reading has been taught.

“In the method familiar to generations of students, an entire class reads a novel — often a classic — together to draw out the themes and study literary craft. That tradition, proponents say, builds a shared literary culture among students, exposes all readers to works of quality and complexity and is the best way to prepare students for standardized tests.”

I bolded the last five words because they are the crux of the problem.

Is the purpose of school to prepare for standardized tests or to teach kids to think?

Are communities stronger and the workforce more cohesive because the people all read To Kill A Mockingbird in eighth grade? And what of those educated elsewhere?

What serves the future better, a love of learning and reading or the skill to ace a standardized test?

At which do you want your kids to excel?

Which skill set do you want to hire?

What do you think?

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Long weekends often lead to interesting conversations as happened to me.

A long time reader and I were talking and he asked where I thought leadership belonged. He said he understood and agreed with my premise that claiming leadership was only for a select few and that selecting them when very young was both wrong and wasteful.

What use then were leadership skills? Did I believe that they, too, were worthless twaddle? Did I have anything useful to offer in their place?

I read back on what I’ve written and I realized that things I thought I’d made clear were more like mud.

I decided that he’s right, if I want to tear up and root out leadership myths, then I need to offer something in their stead and discuss what to do in detail.

Leadership, like charity, begins at home; moreover, it begins with the one person with whom you always have, and always will, live—yourself.

It doesn’t matter what you do or where you do it, if you don’t acquire strong leadership skills and apply them to your own actions, then you set yourself up to follow blindly, lacking the knowledge or discretion to choose your leaders wisely and to look after yourself.

I doubt that’s an attractive scenario to you and it certainly isn’t one that I want to encourage.

So some of what we’ll talk about over the next few weeks is how you can apply useful leadership skills to your own situation; more about how your unique MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) impacts them; how and why it’s important to tweak them to fit your MAP.

I invite you to weigh in, agree or disagree and to ask whatever questions will enable you to put it all to use.

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