What is "culture"? It is our natural and inherent "value system" (how we judge and react to internal and external stimuli) and the associated range of human behavioral patterns.
In our present culture the desire for and adulation of riches and material success over almost everything else is paramount. "How can I make more money?", "Show me the money" are the stock phases of upwardly mobile "successful" people. A person driving a Mercedes S500 draws instant admiration over someone seated in a Hyndai Elantra. Even schools of higher learning advertise their degrees as a way to make more money.
This worship of wealth leads us to equate success with wealth and define success in terms of wealth. This kind of talk permeates our society, rules the media and starts off our children on the wrong foot armed with erroneous ideas.
Expensive does not mean good and rich does not mean great.
and usher in an era of Kind-Excellence that will re-establish America's leadership role in the world.
It doesn't take genius to demand that you get EVERYTHING you "deserve". But it takes a man of extraordinary courage and vision to happily accept less than what he "deserves" and instead create more value for everyone around him -- and ultimately for himself.
What is "culture"? It is our natural and inherent "value system" (how we judge and react to internal and external stimuli) and the associates range of human behavioral patterns.
-- should make it easier for everyone to realize this automatically. That is not the case today, and that is the innovative cultural change we need to transform society and make America a much happier and productive nation.
Leadership is one of those words males salivate over (American males salivate over words like strategy). Leadership, as a word, refers to the illusion that one person "gets" people moving or doing valuable things, from someone's perspective, after the fact. What "gets" that sort of thing is quite various and some cultures want, indeed, have to see that sort of thing, in all its manifestations, as due to an "individual" "leader". Solidarity in Poland was a cloud of locusts (reporters) seeking "the leader" of what in reality was a spontaneous outpouring of long pent up resentments done by the human analog of boiling water (spontaneous parallel micro-nucleation cascades--a la Los Alamos). They found an electrician (I think that's what he was) who was photogenic and near the airport and made him into the person who "led everyone into this great event". Everyone except the reporters was both surprised, amused, and contemptuous of this gross distortion of reality by Americans and Westerners forced by forces inside their minds from their upbringing and cultures, to attribute all outcomes not to the people obviously doing them but to "a leader" who must have "gotten" all those people to do that--how could mere people do anything?
So you want to study this crap. In total quality terms I would suggest, instead, studying--the greatest outcomes small not-so-talented groups of people have ever obtained and how that happened. You will find precious little "leadership" in investigating that.
But there is a huge market for "leadership"--all those meaningless cowardly business males lusting for "why does everyone not see my great importance in the overall scheme of things", "why is everyone always overlooking how central, big, and important I am"--poor poor males, born into a world that never makes them feel central enough and important enough. Perhaps if they crush some enemies, or mass kill whole nations--Stalin, Hitler, Alexander the Great, Napoleon--people will see how important they really are!
Read Grint's book on leadership and Sternberg's recently edited book on it, then decide whether there is enough real stuff there to spend years of your life studying it, or whether, what you would be studying would be the insistence of certain masses of insecure males in certain Western cultures that everything big and important has, behind it as cause, a lone heroic individual person, just like them, whose importance was not adequately recognized throughout life. See if there is anything there other than sheer male hormone effects.
That done, let's assume, the next step is figuring out what higher education intends to do to you and whether that is also what you intend to get done to you. The quality universities do not teach things like leadership--in grad schools they change your brain from amateurish ways of thinking to professional ways, they replace opinions with evidence as a basis of thought and act. You go to school NOT to learn THINGS but to get your brain trained. This feels really really humiliating and bad. Many middle age people cannot suffer through to the finish of it.
So go to second or third tier institutions who do not train your brain but who shovel info you could better and faster get by reading a good book. You waste all your money here but the process is easy and a stamp gets put on your ass that fools people even less educated than you are. If this suits you, go ahead.
To be strictly honest--the way your phrased your question above--indicates to me you do not have the slightest idea what graduate education is all about. If I were you I would sit in on classes ostensibly on "leadership" at Yale, Princeton, the New School, MIT, Harvard, just to get a feel of what the graduate education process at places like that is trying to do to minds like yours.
The reason for you to do this is powerful--if you fully know WHY you will go to school well.
Once I was getting off my car in a parking lot, a couple of slots away from an American family getting off their Camry, and I clearly heard one of their 2 children (he couldn't have been more than 4 years old) point at a Mercedes and remark "That's an expensive car" with a lot of admiration.
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