The leadership rookie

Muzafer woke up that Monday morning quite early. It was silent and dark outside that modest Oklahoma City hotel bedroom in that warm July of 1954. Carol, his love and his main companion in this adventure, was still in deep dreams whilst he was mentally reviewing his past years in Turkey and the US. Today was a big day. The culmination of many failures and some success. He hoped the experiment that was about to start in Robbers Cave State Park (OK) would catapult him into an eminence in the world of social psychology. He did not know yet, but he was setting the foundation of the Realistic Conflict Theory (RCT). It had not been an easy ride for him, Dr. Sherif. His first two experiences in the US at Harvard and Columbia had been quite successful earning him a PhD, a great reputation and a safe haven in Ankara University back home. Since then, his life had become utterly complicated. First the political situation in Europe made him flee to the US and then, in the US, the scrutiny of...

It is a cold May 1916 day in Elephant Island. A flock of penguins is observing with awe and interest a group of beings struggling to stand together against the fury of the wind. The birds have never seen those large bipeds in that latitude (61° S). Ernest Shackleton is looking at the same 27-people group. He knows them inside out. He recruited them for the now-failed expedition that was supposed to cross the Antarctica. He has shared with them seventeen long months of a strenuous survival journey. Ten months trapped inside the Endurance in the frozen waters of Weddell Sea followed by six months living on a floe and finally one week on three tiny boats trying to reach solid ground. Today is therefore a day of immense joy for those individuals. However, Shackleton, known as ‘the boss’, is aware that victory resides still far away, and the flame of hope is cold and almost invisible. Nobody is going to rescue them from this remote, ice-covered mountainous island. He has resolv...

Shizo san quickly recognized the orange taste in his mouth, it was a strange orange salty taste though. He was exhausted and could not well remember where he was. His eyelids weighted like two stones but managed to open them enough to realize he was in a room. There were two blonde-haired gentlemen staring at him. He quickly closed his eyes to try to understand the where and the why. Shizo Kanakuri, born in Tamana (Japan) in 1891, was one of the two Japanese athletes in the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. The first ever Japanese expedition to the sports festival. He was a marathon runner and an incredible 1911 mark in the Japan trials had catapulted him into the big Swedish event. The trip from Japan to the Nordic country had taken 17 days, first by boat to Russia and then by rail through the Tran Siberian route to the final destination. These had been two difficult weeks of training, first running laps around the boat and second running on the Russian rail stations every time the...

Emperor Constantine was still in bed in his Blachernae palace of that April 13rd 6961 AM (April 23rd 1452 in the Gregorian calendar). His mind was going in circles trying to find ways to survive  the Ottoman siege that was threatening the city for over two weeks. Constantinoble was the last bastion of the Roman Empire, just a tiny territory of what had been the biggest power humankind had seen to date. His hope to receive support from Rome and Venetia was vanishing. T he miraculous Theodosian walls - over a thousand years old - were holding well to Sultan Mehmed’s new weaponry. But the scarcity of resources, both in terms of army and food, would require a magic solution. He did not want to be known as the Emperor who lost Constantinoble. Suddenly, in the midst of these thoughts, the sound of somebody knocking on his bedroom door resonated throughout the big chamber as yet another Ottoman bomb. That was unusual. He was the emperor. Who was to bother an emperor with such insi...

Coffee was not as tasty and sophisticated as in Vienna. Abraham Wald was having these thoughts whilst sipping his first morning cup on a cold January morning of 1943. He was looking through the window of his Columbia University office as flocks of snow were falling on Manhattan’s streets. The cold winters had accompanied him throughout his life, from his hometown in Cluj (now Romania), to his college and doctorate years in Vienna to now New York City. This was the place that had warmly welcomed him and recognized his valued mathematician knowledge after having to flee Europe before the start of the war. He turned his head to his desk. There, the most important challenge of his life - in the shape of a pile of papers with drawings, letters and numbers – was lying just waiting for him to solve it. He was part of the Statistics Research Group (SRG), a team of renowned professors (including Milton Friedman and George Stigler – future Nobel Prizes) gathered by the US government to su...

She heard his key on the door, about to open it. It was 3:30pm approximately, the same time he had arrived home from work in the last 35 years. She had always been looking forward to his arrival, with the late lunch on the table and a list of anecdotes of the day to discuss about. But the last two months had been different and the door noise was no longer a source of joy but a source of agony. He was 61 and two months ago he had been told by his all-life employer that he was no longer needed in the company and that there was a good exit deal he’d better adhere to. On the façade he took it well, there would be much more time to read, to listen to music and to travel and he had work hard long enough. However, in his insight he was a bullet to his pride as he felt he was still doing an immensely valuable job for his company. And she knew his insight and she knew he was not fine. So, when, that afternoon, he gave him the welcome kiss she was surprised to see a new shine in his b...

It was 7 am and Rei was still in bed. Her eyes were looking at the ceiling of her bedroom. Her mind was following each step of the 3.8km he had to run later that day in the Princess Ekiden (relay) Corporate Marathon of Fukuoka. She took her phone as she had just received a text message. It was Marie, her best friend and a relay runner in her team later that day. “hi Rei, are you up? I am so nervous. Will we make it to the national competition?”. “Of course! 😊 ”. She replied. “See you in an hour downstairs”. Both lived in Fukuoka’s university dorm, were 19-year-old and had met last year as they both started working some hours a week for Iwatani Sangyo corporation in an internship. Marie was the one that had seen the internal announcement looking for runners for the famous marathon. It was six months ago and they had trained very hard. Their goal to qualify for the national competition did not seem too far away according to the most experimented runners in the team who had partic...