Some of my followers asked for some more one liners. So here they are, the good, the bad, and the ugly:

• Seek the hard jobs that no one else wants. Fix things that are broken, change things that are bad, and correct things that are wrong. (Your success will pay back in reputation, respect, position/compensation and affirmation, in time.)

• Fear and guilt are inseparable partners. They are the bulkheads that defer leaders from doing the audacious and unthinkable, even when obvious.

• I rarely considered the impossible to measure characteristic of a great leader who possesses the instinct to recognize disorder and then restore it.

• Being reasonable is often not an option to the turnaround leader or to the military leader in war planning and actual combat.

• As a leader, how many times when you proposed or directed a change in policies, procedures, or processes, did you hear the refrain from the staff that ‘we already tried that and it didn’t work’? After so long, my standard retort was, ‘you may have tried it or something like it, but you didn’t have Jim Benson supervising the implementation.’ (That may sound like a cocky, conceited response, but the naysayers and foot draggers who torture every new idea or change deserve no better).

• It has always been my experience that my lapses in judgment ostensibly coincided with me distancing myself from my faith.

• In a small business; a not-for-profit school or college; or even a church, the leader needs to resemble a ‘systems analyst’ as he/she pours over the numbers while always seeking the means to discover methods to define success or the lack thereof. If this is not done, he/she better find someone else on the staff that loves numbers, or else adios.

• Congressional poll watchers, such as they are, fail to remind themselves that it is the Federal government that pays their salaries and provides them their lucrative appurtenances — not their state governments. I am still searching for the congressional statesman who will look his constituents in the eye and say to them, ‘I will always listen to your concerns, ideas, grievances, and recommendations, but I will always vote in accordance with what appears to me as best for our country.’ Of course, I am not going to find that person, because virtually all are simply politicians whose primary motive is winning the next election. Term limits appear to be the only hope to fix our country.

  This blog is too long, but I love the final verse of Ernest Henley’s great poem titled “Invictus, because its very essence is that we alone are responsible for for our ‘state in life.’

  ‘It matters not how straight the gate,

  How charged with punishment the scroll,

  I am the master of my fate;

  I am the Captain of my soul.’