The Elephant in the Room: How Relationships Make or Break the Success of Leaders and Organizations

FOUR

Using the Heat of the Moment

As conflict—difference—is here in the world, as we cannot avoid it, … Instead of condemning it, we should set it to work for us.

—MARY PARKER FOLLETT, 1925

In the chaos just after Abraham Lincoln was shot, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton mistakenly rushed to the house of the wounded secretary of state, William Seward. There he found blood splattered from the first floor to the third, but no president.¹ Next he ran to the boardinghouse near Ford's Theatre, where he found Lincoln lying unconscious on a narrow bed, and where the surgeon general quietly told him the president would not recover. Of what happened next, ...