The WSJ article is about an executive who found out his bosses were being unethical and defrauding people. He subsequently quit his job even though it cost him a lot of money to do so and he knew ahead of time that it would. There is a great lesson in this article that money is not everything and that it is more important to do the right thing even though it will require some self sacrifice monetarily. Some other lessons here are that executives should not let the sense of entitlement, which generally goes with the position, go to their head and an executive that surrounds their self with yes-sayers puts themselves at risk of doing just that.

The second article is about self-sacrifice as well, albeit in a more indirect way. The article contends that good leadership requires boss’s to put their employees interests ahead of their own. This is the concept of servant leadership. To achieve this personal sacrifice, on the part of the leader, is often necessary and this is the reason servant leadership is as rare as it is. Some aspects of servant leadership are empowerment delegation (giving people the power to own their jobs) and the leader acting as coach (mentor your employees) instead of the artifact of command-and-control. One caveat: in order for servant leadership to work, the employees must be, at least somewhat, internally motivated and able and willing to take ownership of their job, it is not just a case of the employee sitting back and being served by their leader. Our society and our culture have a strong element of self-sufficiency and rugged individualism as wells as “one makes one’s own destiny” sort of thinking; this is often at odds with self-sacrifice and a servant mentality. Maybe if we could think about the idea of karma and what comes around goes around. In serving others, there may be delayed gratification but the good energy that one creates when serving others definitely comes back around to us.