The unprecedented transparency of our time is a making change by the day. Our era, with transparency and the spread of information, is decentralizing authority and power at a breakneck pace. Those who understand this can break away. Those who attempt to hold back may well be trampled.

There are people all around us whose lives are masterpieces of service. One thinks of parents working two or three jobs to serve their families and community. So, too, many in the military or in nursing or teaching. As the needs are endless, so are the possibilities of service. Now, more than ever, empowered by the Internet, more of us can serve in more ways than ever before in history.

Many people have a very hard time truly believing that doing the right thing by others, striving to serve them to the greatest extent, can actually be a competitive advantage.

Theodore Roosevelt regarded leadership as his one gift, the area in which he might be considered to possess genius. He presented his views on leadership throughout his voluminous writings. He intended for future writers to study them with an eye toward action, as he himself had done of historic figures.

One wonders if Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon's administrations may come to be viewed, in the future, as having been underestimated in some respects. To be sure, each ended in failure. Nonetheless, Johnson's accomplishments in civil rights and immigration legislation, and Nixon's in respect to relations with China, may loom larger with the passage of time.

In a time when our nation is engaged in multiple, long-term wars, it's critical that "the military" not become an abstraction to the vast majority of Americans who are not participants.

Legal training has been quite useful in developing critical thinking. Whether one attains it in mathematics, philosophy or law, an analytic grounding can add great value in defining and confronting complex problems, or laying out a path to implement a vision.