Good leaders are people with a conscience who respect and reward all the four drives of other stakeholders [the drive to acquire, to defend, to bond, and to comprehend], even as they respect and reward their own drives.

The classic trading system of exchange is identified with David Ricardo, the early nineteenth-century economist who first analytically clarified it.

As practiced today, Ricardo's classic system results in win-win exchanges when both trading partners are either (1) industrialized nations with modern impulse/check/balance governments, no excessive unemployment, and reasonably effective control of corporate abuses or (2) less-developed nations roughly equal in power and with some control of corporate abuses. Unfortunately, much of today's international trade does not meet these conditions.

To do the right thing, a leader needs to understand what it takes to do things right, and to make sure they actually get done.

[how can one tell if an idea is any good?] Here’s the simple litmus test: Does your community care? Everyone has a “community” of constituents—customers, users, readers, clients, etc. Share your ideas liberally. If your community engages with them (either for or against them), then you know you’re onto something. If they don’t look twice you know that you either need to reconsider the idea or rethink how you communicate it.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.