Yet for many leaders humility is difficult to come by. Like most people, leaders are prone to self-admiration. And a leader might hear every day—sometimes directly, sometimes in ways more oblique—that his ideas are insightful, his jokes funny, even that he is virtuous. Sometimes the praise is sincere, sometimes not; but in either case the leader who takes it seriously will allow himself to be convinced, though he might not say it aloud, that his admirers indeed have a point. And then he will begin to set himself above his followers. Honest reflection can deflate these pretensions. A leader who
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