When asking for LNO nominations to fill critical positions, we used two criteria: (1) if it doesn’t pain you to give the person up, pick someone else; (2) if it’s not someone whose voice you’ll recognize when they call you at home at 2:00 a.m., pick someone else. Previously, we might have made these decisions based on rank, position, or where people wanted to go in their careers. But to get this right, personal qualities trumped everything else. These were people who needed to enter an unknown, and sometimes hostile, bureaucratic environment, then build trust-based relationships with the
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