This is an intriguing book and a must read for anybody who is remotely interested in geopolitics. The author basically talks about how geography has driven the security or lack thereof of all countries. In spite of technology today, high mountains, deep seas and wide rivers drive most of the geopolitical calculations of every country. This stems from the need to protect trade and security of its citizens.

The book caught my attention right in the first chapter. Very well timed. This was written way before the Ukraine war. But once you read this chapter you will realize why Russia attacked Ukraine. In fact, the author predicted that it waas inevitable. While the author does not condone war – and like all of us – is numbed at the deaths and atrocities, he points out the history of the Northern European Plains – thru which over centuries many many countries have attacked Russia. In fact about once in every 35 years!

Some of the fascinating facts you will learn will include why Europe has so many countries. Part of the reason lies in geography. Most of the major rivers in Europe do not meet. This formed early boundaries for individual spheres of influence – often giving rise to a cities on the banks where people gathered for trade. Eventually, they became the capitals.

Also how Africa’s tardiness in progress can be traced back to lacking any deep, natural harbors (but beautiful, beautiful beaches) and all those impressive rivers having waterfalls ever so often. Ruling out any convenient modes of trade or transportation.

He continues to give a great narrative of how China’s actions – trade wise and military wise, the India-Pakistan conflict (which he predicts will never end), Korea and Japan, The Middle East – so much of the countries’ political decisions and policies are dictated by simple geography. Once you understand the geography of their borders, a lot of their actions are understandable (may not be condonable).

The other thing the author points out is the lasting negative effects European colonialism has had as they – and this includes the Belgians, French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese and worst of all, the British – who arbitrarily drew country boundaries when the left (have you noticed all the straight line boundaries of countries in Africa or the Middle East?) that paid no heed to the kinds of peoples who live there and thereby ensured that geopolitical conflicts will be a permanent thing.

The most fascinating part is the last chapter. He describes how the melting of the Arctic cap will open up more trading lines, bringing down the importance of the Panama canal and the Suez canal and how different countries will have aggressive postures to establish their primacy in the Arctic. This includes countries like Russia, the Scandinavian countries, US, Canada and such.

Again, an outstanding read. Two thumbs up.

I am getting more and more convinced that books written by medical doctors have basically one message – “Here is the one thing – and it will solve all problems of your body”. This book – referred to me by my dietitian – left a similar aftertaste as after reading the book “Why Zebras do not get Ulcers” (remember?). At least that book had a lot of humor and kept the delivery interesting while almost trying to prove that glucocorticoids were the solution to all your problems.

This book was initially interesting to read – it does a great job in explaining the microbiome and how the bacteria works and also how fiber rich foods are processed by our body. But then as you proceed thru the chapters, the author’s pitch become more and more shrill and the writing becomes almost a marketing pitch. Apparently, fiber will solve all our problems. In his defense, he does concede that there are circumstances like celiac disease patients for whom all fiber may not be a panacea.

The challenge for me, of course, is to accept that there is one solution for everybody. Given our bodies are so different from each other – and there are seven and a half billion of them – I would have expected a little more circumspect approach for any truly research based opinion.

Some of the concepts in the beginning are compelling and educational. For example, the way he explains how food choices affect the biome. And how leaky gut causes inflammation. He also teaches the concept of prebiotics, probiotics and postbiotics very well.

Some of his ideas will cause you to sit up. For example, his belief that outside of the five vitals – temperature, pulse, respiratory rate, blood pressure and oxygen level, there should be a sixth one – quality of bowel movement. He does go on to make a compelling case for this.

But then he goes on screaming from the rooftop how every disease can be solved by eating fiber. Often quotes research but I am very skeptical of statements like “Research has shown…”. Not all research are done with the same level of integrity.

In the end, he dedicates another large portion of the book to be a chef with pages and pages of recipes.

That said, I learnt a few things:

1. There are 5 types of microorganisms in our body – bacteria, yeast, parasites, viruses and archaea (never heard of the last one!!)
2. We carry 39 trillion microorganisms in our body. Most of them are bacteria.
3. 90% of serotonin and 50% of dopamine is produced in the gut. This shocked me. I guess that is why the gut is the second brain.
4. Apparently, genetics have less to do with diseases (only 20% – based on studies of identical twins). 99% of our DNA comes from the biome and only 1% is from the rest of our body.

But above all, his concept of “Eat all the colors of plant based food” is sound advice and I would not take anything away from that.

If you read this book, I would suggest start tapering off around the middle of the book.

You might remember that during my Covid days, I had the great experience of enjoying full and complete silence during my quarantine. I was by myself in the new house and the irritated throat made sure I could not talk on the phone either. The experience was such that I extended my quarantine period by a day. That grew my initial curiosity in silence.

The first book I read on Silence was not that fruitful. See the review here.

In a second attempt, tried a book by the renowned Vietnamese monk – Thich Nhat Hanh – credited to be the “Father of Mindfulness”. (who, incidentally passed away less than a month back) This was much better. Still did not hit the sweet spot for me. But good all the same.

I think what I am looking for is more a book that delves into how to practice silence. While this book does get into it, it also talks about the general concept of silence (hint: it is not about lack of noise in our environment).

Some of the lines that I liked from this book:

1. “We revisit old memories and experiences, only to suffer again and again the pain we’ve already experienced.”

2. “Not talking, by itself, already can bring a significant degree of peace. If we can also offer ourselves the deeper silence of not thinking, we can find, in that quiet, a wonderful lightness and freedom”.

3. “We may not be cows or buffalo, but we ruminate just the same on our thoughts – unfortunately, primarily negative thoughts”.

4. “Living from a place of silence doesn’t mean never talking, never engaging or doing things it simply means that we are disturbed inside; there isn’t constant internal chatter.”

5. “We have a natural tendency to want to run away from suffering. But without any sufferings, we can’t fully develop as human beings.”

I will give this book a thumbs up.

This is one of the books I had started exploring when I had Covid. If you remember, I was trying to look for books on Silence.

Overall, I did not enjoy the book. Just gave up after reading one third of it. Krishnamurti’s commentary or insights are fairly interesting. I loved the very first chapter – “The Purpose of Education”. But the editor, in my opinion, has made a mess of the whole book by presenting 27 very disparate chapters (each mercifully only 4-5 pages long). The jump from one topic to another has little flow and even less lucidity. Inside of a chapter, there are a couple of pages of Krishnamurti’s insights and then there are a few questions that he answers. The questions seem off place – or at least the connection to the topic de jure is tenuous most of the times. Or at least to a person like me, so it seemed.

Certainly cannot recommend this book. There has to be a better book that has put Krishnamurti’s thoughts together.

By Guy Deutscher

Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

I forget which book, but somewhere I had read that Russians have two different words for what we club as “blue”. And they “see” two different colors if you showed them the whole spectrum of “blue” whereas we see one. That had given rise to an interesting question in my mind – Does our perception of the world get affected by our mother tongue (the language we learn to express what we perceive by) or do we all perceive the same thing – we just express it differently?

During Covid, downloaded a book after quite some research – Through the Language Glass and was fascinated by what I learnt.

Found out that Russians are likely to find it ridiculous that English speakers think of two different colors – “siniy” and “goluboj” – as one color – blue. They fail to understand how we do not clearly perceive two different colors. We just don’t see how these are different. If pressed, we will admit, one is simply “deep” blue (think deep ocean color) and the other is “light” blue (this about the Caribbean waters). Conversely, we are likely to find it ridiculous that the Ovaherero people in Namibia do not see the two colors – green and blue as two different colors. We wonder – “What’s wrong with you? How can you say blue trees and green sky?”. It is not like they do not register in their brain as two different colors – it is just that they do not see what is the big need to call them two different colors. Just like we don’t see the need to label deep blue and light blue differently in normal life.

Grammar is yet another area where how we think of events get influenced deeply. Take verbs for example. In English, you have to convey to the audience the “tense” of the verb. You have to pass on the perception of if the event happened in the past, present or future. But you do not need to pass on the perception of the “person” (subject) who for example “walked”. In Arabic though, both the tense and the person is embedded in the verb. In Chinese, neither is embedded. The language grammar influences what you think are the important things to be conveyed during aa conversation.

Different languages force the speaker to pay attention to different aspects of the world every time you try to speak or listen. As an interesting (and somewhat extreme) example, there are Amazon tribes (like Matses) where you cannot just say “Rajib ran by our street”. The language will force you convey either experience (did you see him run) or evidence (he left his water bottle by your gate) or conjecture (he always runs by our street) or hearsay (your neighbor told you he ran by your street).

The most fascinating one is how certain folks (scattered all over the world – Polynesia, Mexico, Bali, Nepal, Namibia, Madagascar) have no concept of left or right. Just the four cardinal directions. Imagine that. Regardless of where they are, they always have an accurate sense of what is North!!

Even gender biases show up in how we see the world. Time and again, an experiment has been done – almost always with the same results. A bunch of Spanish folks and a bunch of German folks are shown a picture of a bridge and asked to describe it in adjectives. The Spanish – for whom bridge is a masculine noun (“el puente”) – use words like big, dangerous, long, strong, sturdy, towering… and the Germans – for whom bridge is a feminine noun (“die Brucke”) see it as beautiful, elegant, fragile, peaceful, pretty and slender!

There are many more such interesting examples from different languages. Eventually, the author answers the question that I had – although apparently, the answer has been settled for good only in the last half century – the language you speak in absolutely biases you regarding how you perceive the world.

Highly recommend this book if this is an interest area for you.

Author: Adam Grant

I have to start by admitting that reviewing this book has been more difficult than most books. First, I have been distracted in a few other things which meant that reading this book took a lot more time than it should have. Somshekhar – whose intellectual curiosities coincide with mine (although he has a far more wisdom than I do) had pointed me to this book. Another bibliophile that I rely on – Soumyadipta – however, was lukewarm on this book (at least in comparison with Adam Grant’s other books). That was a conundrum I had to solve by reading it thoroughly and judge for myself.

I have independently landed with the opinion that this is a two thumbs up book.

It does a fascinating job of questioning one’s own biases and the fallacy of letting one’s identity be defined by one’s opinions (the concept of ego). Instead, he delves into the benefits of doubt and joy of being wrong. (I recognize that the concept of deriving joy from being wrong can raise a few eyebrows).

Recently I was at a coffee shop when a young lady came in with her toddler. When she let him down, he moved around like a drunk person hitting a thing here and there and trying to learn how to stay up balanced and take a few steps. As the book predicted, we all were filled with joy and clapped to encourage the kid.

But ask yourself – if your friend suddenly decided to learn skateboarding (okay, that hit too close to home 🙂 ) – and a few of you watch him taking steps like he was three sheets to the wind, the usual reaction is to laugh … not clap and encourage. Why is it that we accept that kids will make mistakes as they learn but we do not recognize that in adults?

The author then delves into a topic rather close to my heart – creating learning organizations. I thought he demonstrated surprisingly deep understanding of corporate culture on this topic.

If not anything else, you are bound to learn how to have very nuanced conversations – how to complexify contentious topics and not shy away from caveats and contingencies.

Like I said, two thumbs up from me.

Did you know you can whistle more accurately than you can sing? Do you know why?
OR
Most of us have difficulty copying a drawing of a face. Turn it upside down and it becomes much easier!! Do you know why?
OR
Students who studied both science and arts – a relative rarity – were much more likely to later assume leadership roles?

Well, the reason I picked up this book is my desire to learn new skills every other year or so. I was looking for a book that delves into the learning process itself. I had to believe that at a first derivative level, learning lessons must follow similar patterns regardless of the skill. And if I understood those patterns, learning might become easier as I keep getting old.

The book does not disappoint. For one, it is written by a journalist – who tend to have a flair for writing. For another, he himself has picked up a lot of new skills – playing chess, singing, swimming, surfing, juggling, drawing – at a fairly high level at a fairly old age.

The book started a little slow for me – I was okay with the story telling – but I was looking for some insights. The speed picks up in the subsequent chapters. There is one chapter that is fully dedicated to understanding the learning process and how at old age, we make learning difficult for ourselves.

Some interesting insights about being a beginner:
1. A man progresses in all things by making a fool of himself – GB Shaw
2. Becoming a first-time parent is one of the more fundamental experiences of being a beginner
3. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the experts mind there are few – Shunryu Suzuki
4. Students who studied both science and arts – a relative rarity – were much more likely to later assume leadership roles.

Why we stop learning new things:
1. What is admired in today’s society is success, achievement and the quality of performance rather than the quality of experience – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
2. The idea of undertaking new pursuits, ones that you may never be very good at, seems perverse in this age of single-minded peak performance.
3. “To permit yourself to do only that which you are good at, is to be trapped in a cage whose bars are not steel but self-judgment”
4. Much of our pain in learning, argues Barbara Oakley, comes from getting hung up on results.

Some considerations towards learning:
1. We all have latent abilities that can be unlocked
2. Skills take time
3. Failure is an essential part of learning
4. Change up your practice
5. Your progress is not going to be linear
6. Skills rarely “transfer”
7. Always be on the edge of the impossible (if it feels easy, you’re probably not learning)
8. Learning new skills helps open new worlds.
9. Goals are good, but keep your eyes open for opportunity

Interesting things I learnt about singing:
1. Weirdly, whispering usually puts more strain on the vocal folks than speaking
2. We do not have as much control over our mouth as over our larynx. In fact, we can whistle more accurately than we can sing
3. The vowel is the voice. The consonant is the interruption of the voice

Dreyfus model of learning:
1. Beginners are always looking at themselves. We do worse at an activity when we focus on ourselves, instead of some “external” target
2. Beginners judge their performance by how well they follow the rules.
3. If beginners are about learning rules, advanced beginners are about actually applying those rules. That also involves when not to apply those rules or how to act when no rule seems to apply.
4. There are often, in moments of anxiety, a disconnect in skills learning between instinct and proper technique… hitting high notes, you bend your knees and dip down, in skiing, you lean forward not to fall, in motorcycling, you push the handle left to go left, in surfing, you punch the accelerator when the brain says brake.

Interesting things I learnt about juggling:
1. One way to improve learning, research suggests, is to make skills seem easier in the beginning (juggle slowly).
2. The key to learning juggling is not thinking. Thinking gets in the way of learning.
3. Sleep, or even a short rest, is one of our best learning tools.
4. The brain wants to be puzzled and learn something new. It likes learning for learning’s sake. Taking gaps in learning – and making mistakes again – solidifies learning.
5. Drawing is said to be a good way to actually acquire knowledge because the act of drawing adds another layer of memory encoding our brain.

Interesting things I learnt about drawing:
1. Copying a drawing of a face is much easier if you just turn it upside down! The brain is not hamstrung by the “meaning” of it anymore! What people drew was more influenced by the symbols in their minds than what was on the page.
2. If you look in a crowded room, all heads appear of same size (called size constancy). Try to draw all heads of same size and something will look wrong on the page. Now draw the heads to their actual dimensions and the brain will see the drawing and still see them all sat the same size!
3. Drawing is not hard. Seeing is!!

Some final points from the author:
1. One of the almost inevitable by products of learning new things is the spillover effect of wanting to learn more new things…
2. The most important lesson was that it was never too late to be a beginner

Two thumbs up from me!!!

Author: Eric Weiner

I forget who it was that had brought my attention to this book. Smart money is on Somsekhar Baksi. If you are inclined towards learning very quickly about some of the key points about quite a few philosophers – some of who, I guarantee you have not heard of and some you may not think of as a philosopher either (e.g. Gandhiji), this is a great read.

As always with every book, each time you read it, a few points hit home runs for you. One of those winners for me was actually from the author himself – not any particular philosopher. And it deals with 10 points about How to Grow Old.

Here are some memorable quotes from the book that might pique your interest.

1. Miles Kington – “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad”
2. Albert Camus – “Suicide is the one truly serious philosophical problem”. Is life worth living or not?
3. Jacob Needleman – “The Heart of Philosophy” – “Our culture has generally tended to solve its problems without experiencing its questions.
4. John Stuart Mill – Pleasure Paradox – Happiness is a by-product, never an objective
5. Thoreau – Doubt is essential. It is the vehicle that transports us from one certainty to another.
6. Idealism – Everything we experience is a mental representation of the world, not the world itself. Physical objects only exist when we perceive them. (fridge light example)
7. Music speaks to the essence of life. An image of heaven even a secularized one, may or may not have paintings and statues. We take it for granted that there will be music.
8. We lead telephoto lives in a wide angle world
9. We lose objects suddenly, but experience the loss gradually.
10. Everyone hopes to reach old age, but when it comes most of us complain about it.

Book Review: Calendar – Humanity’s Epic struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year
David Ewing Duncan

I am not sure who had referred me to this book, but it was in the comment section of some other Book Review I had written. Unfortunately, this book is not available in the digital format. I got the paper version, but since I do not often carry a book with me, I never got around to actually reading this. Till now.

A fascinating book on how we came up with calendars. The numerous mistakes, the number of lives lost (yes, just because of calendar design), the arbitrary dropping of dates in calendar (different countries did in different times) all make for a great read. The author narrates this more as a history lesson than anything else. And he does a great job.

He starts almost on a philosophical note when he talks about how today, we are constantly looking backward and forward in time but never contented with the present. In a way that our ancestors who tilled fields and lived and died according to the great cycles of nature would have never comprehended.

The story he takes us thru starts with the Cro-Magnon man. One of whom would have realized the curious nature of how the moon every night changed and came back to the same position ever so often (about 29 days) as evidenced in bones with telling marks from those days. And thus, almost all calendar journeys for us started with the moon and lunar calendars. Even to this date, lunar calendars are followed in many parts of the world (including my own Bengali calendar – which has been later adapted to take into account the sun’s movement).

Later, the need to take into account the “seasons” came in – especially as farming and harvesting became more prevalent. And that started the eternal struggle to figure out how to calculate a calendar year. Because any which way we divided the cycle of seasons (about 365 days and change) it could never fit well within an integral number of cycles of the moon (about 29 days and change). The resultant was that for the most of the our known human history, our seasons and equinoxes and all that never came “on time”. We were always in error.

The Babylonians, who were very good in astronomy compromised with a “lunisolar” year but it was the Egyptians that truly embraced the sun and ditched the moon to fix the “year”. They Mayans came up with an even more complicated calendar (it was a three calendar system). The Egyptians had figured out that there was another quarter day after 365 to make it a full year but they ignored it for the most part.

The Romans, in the meanwhile, were a mess. It was Caesar who after coming to help Cleopatra got to know about the Egyptian system and then more or less bulldozed a far more modern system in the Roman empire. Which continued for a fairly long time.

Eventually, biggest need for time accuracy that the West felt was the Easter date. The most sacred date at that point of time, celebrations of the same would have been blasphemy if it did not happen on the right date. Ironically, the calendar then was somewhat of a “secret” with the church having a stranglehold on it and they would announce dates often abruptly. Sometimes to favor themselves or kings they liked.

It was Constantine who gave the next big thrust to fixing a calendar year with the great conference in Nicaea that more or less standardized the calculation of the Easter day. It was a fairly onerous task involving nearly 15 equations.

Then came a long period of decline of the Church, the Roman Empire and the West in general. Meanwhile, Islam started their own calendar and the fact that the Indian and Chinese had their own calendars (all mostly moon based) came to the fore as knowledge of other lands started gaining a stronghold in the West.

While Aryabhata from India was a big influence in how the calendar eventually shaped up, the Indian civilizations biggest contribution to the calendar was possibly cracking the positional system. Like 365 means 3 hundreds, 6 tens and 5 unit. It seems so natural now – but imagine the world before that. Just think about the Roman numerals that we are so familiar with. Here is a paradox – even though the Indians knew and depicted fractions (one number up, one number down) – it is not known why they never cracked the decimal system (which is also positional) to represent fractions.

Interestingly, that simple twist delayed the calendar year determination. Basically, we did not know how to represent what we already knew (couldn’t write fractions !!). The Arabs cracked that problem and then they get the credit for calculating a year to the greatest accuracy in those days (12 digits after the decimal). The Europeans did not care about the importance of this “slip”. Incidentally, the person who calculated this is Omar Khayyam. Most of us in the West think of him as the brilliant poet. He was much more.

In the West, the Church continued to thwart efforts by others like Copernicus, Galileo to scientifically fix the year in what can be described as the Dark Ages of the Calendar. Eventually, Pope Gregory XIII called a Niceae style conference to resolve the Easter date once and for all. The person who gets full credit for solving the calendar problem finally is one doctor called Aloysius Lilius who was not even alive when the conference took place. His brother presented his case – with a lot of support from Clavius.

Just because this Gegorian calendar was enacted in 1582 does not mean everybody adopted it. The Protestant countries simply refused to, as an example – for no other reason than that it was done by the Catholic Pope! But the other reason was that this change involved dropping 10 days from the calendar to make adjustments to prior errors. Politicians, true to their colors, often used this to confuse the masses who were completely irate that somebody was “stealing 10 days of their lives”. England waited nearly 150 years! Japan adopted in 1873! Russia in 1918 !! China in 1949 !

And then in 1972, we switched to following the oscillations of a Caesium atom to determine a year (about 3 million trillion oscillations) for accuracy – and sometimes in a year adjust the clock by a second to take into account the variations in earth’s speed and tilt. But for the common man, we stay with the 365 days, one leap day every four years, but no leap day on the century year unless it is divisible by 400, in which case, we will have a leap day. For the most part, this will work out for the next 3 thousand years.

Two thumbs up! If anybody in Atlanta wants it, you can borrow my copy. (Too many highlighter marked passages though)

This book was referred to me by Juli Johnson from our company. I believe there is an audio book version of this. I am still a “you read a book, not hear it” kind of guy 🙂

First, this is a very atypical book for me to review – I usually do not study too many books that has to do with work. Second, I am very, very skeptical of any book or any person who tries to teach how to manage talent. My personal experience is that every human being is unique and trying to generalize anything as talent principles is at best, misguided. Remember those books from a few years back that were inspired by Jack Welch’s views on how to deal with the “bottom 10%”. Yes? Good. I am using some of them as doorstop for my music room. Right next to the books on Atkinson’s diet, Paleo diet etc.

Of course, the answer cannot be to throw away everything. You still need some kind of framework of thinking. The key point is to understand that every aspect of talent management is, in all likelihood, over generalization or sometimes, outright, wrong. In fact, most of the “research” cited have one common flaw – they cannot control for other variables. And when we talk about human beings – it is very difficult to control for “other” variables.

The point is to be aware of these flaws in any system. This allows one to recognize the limitations of the frameworks and therefore allows for judgmental calls. As infuriating as it can be (“Where is the fairness?”), evaluating any professional is fundamentally a subjective call. It is subjective depending on the rater, the rated and even the time when the rating is done.

If not anything else, this book will make you think of how deeply flawed our basic assumptions and often quoted, catchy phrases about Talent management is. I also want to suggest that the authors do not necessarily give answers that always make much sense to me. Some do. But maybe you will understand the others better than me.

Here are the top 9 Lies the authors want to highlight to you. The portions in [ ] are my comments. The rest are from the book.

Lie #1: People care which company they work for
People might care about which company they join, but after that, they care which team they are on.

Lie #2: The best plan wins
Company level plans do not predict the future. It merely tells you where you are. The world moves too fast for plans. What wins is providing data and intelligence (what is happening) to everybody quickly and accurately.

Lie #3: The best companies cascade goals
Company goals top down defeats the purpose. Better way would be show the employees what you value. And let the goal setting happen locally.

Lie #4: The best people are well rounded
[This one spoke a lot to me; I still get miffed by performance reviews that talk about Strengths and Weaknesses].
Best people are spiky. They excel in one or two things. Better than most. And they leverage this/these traits to produce outsize results. Uniqueness is a feature. Not a bug.

Lie #5: People need feedback
People need attention. Not feedback. The attention people need is to what they are doing best – not what they are not doing well. We all want to be seen for what we are best at.

Lie #6: People can reliably rate other people.
[This one spoke to me a lot too. If you get a chance, look up Idiosyncratic Rate Effect].
Most raters are terrible in judging others – if there was even a benchmark to measure against. They have deep biases and often are judging based on very little data. What we can reliably rate is our own experience.

Lie #7: People have potential
Like potential is a thing inherent to a person (like a trait). This is a function of the environment and opportunities as much as the person. Every brain is capable of learning – the speed differs based on the environment and opportunities. People have different momentum – we move through the world differently depending upon environment and opportunities.

Lie #8: Work-life balance matters most
Love in work matters most. That is what work is really for.

Lie #9: Leadership is a thing
[This, I found very interesting.]
There is no such thing as leadership skills. Take the name of 10 leaders and you will see there is no pattern to their traits. Some like Steve Jobs was even lacking in some basic ethics area. What does make a leader a leader – and this is a common trait – is that they have followers.
[The authors then spend quite a few pages on why people follow. I found that very intriguing.]

Highly recommend you read it if you care about talent issues.