I gotta have my orange juice.

Edwin Friedman summarizes his leadership principles as follows:

A summary of principles

1. Society

• The characteristics of a chronically anxious family, organization, or society—reactivity, herding, blaming, a quick-fix mentality, lack of well-differentiated leadership—will always be descriptive of a regressed institution.
• When any institution, relationship, or society is imaginatively gridlocked, the underlying causes will always be emotional rather than cerebral.
• All pathogenic (that is, destructive) organisms, forces, and institutions, whether we are considering viruses, malignant, cells, chronically troubling individuals, or totalitarian nations, lack self-regulation and are therefore invasive by nature and cannot be expected to learn from their experience.
• For terrorists to have power, whether in a family or in the family of nations, three conditions must be fulfilled: (1) the absence of well-defined leadership; (2) a hostage situation to which leaders are particularly vulnerable; and (3) an unreasonable faith in reasonableness.
• A major criterion for judging the anxiety level of any society is the loss of its capacity to be playful.
• A society’s culture does not determine its emotional processes; rather, a society’s culture provides the medium through which a society’s emotional processes work their art.
• The basic tension that must constantly be re-balanced in any family, institution, or society is the conflict between the natural forces of togetherness and self-differentiation.

2. Relationships

• It is easier to be the least mature member of a highly mature system than the most mature member of a very immature system.
• Increasing one’s pain threshold for others helps them mature.
• Stress and burnout are relational rather than quantitative, and are due primarily to getting caught in a responsible position for others and their problems.
• In any partnership, the more anxious you are to see that something is done, the less motivated your partner will be to take the lead.
• In any stuck relationship between an overadequate member and an underadequate other (person or organization), the overfunctioner must change before the underfunctioner can change.
• In any relationship anywhere, the partner doing the least amount of thinking about the other is the more attractive one to the other.
• When people differ, the nature of their differences does not determine the extent or the intensity of the differing.

3. Self

• Trauma lies in the self-organizing quality of the system and the response of the organism rather than in the event. In other words, the trauma is in the experience and the response to it, not in the event itself.
• The toxicity of an environment in most cases is proportional to the response of the organism or the institution, rather than to the hostility of the environment.
• What is essential are stamina, resolve, remaining connected, the capacity for self-regulation of reactivity, and having horizons beyond what one can actually see.
• There is no way out of a chronically painful condition except by being willing to go through a temporarily more acutely painful phase.
• People who are cut off from relationship systems, especially their family of origin, do not heal, no matter what their symptom.
• Most of the decisions we make in life turn out to be right or wrong not because we were prescient, but because of the way we function after we make the decision.
• A self is more attractive than a no-self.

4. Leadership

• Mature leadership begins with the leader’s capacity to take responsibility for his or her own emotional being and destiny.
• Clearly defined, non-anxious leadership promotes healthy differentiation throughout a system, while reactive, peace-at-all-costs, anxious leadership does the opposite.
• Differentiation in a leader will inevitably trigger sabotage from the least well-differentiated others in the system.
• Followers cannot rise above the maturity level of their mentors no matter what their mentor’s skill and knowledge-base.
• The unmotivated are notoriously invulnerable to insight.
• Madness cannot be judged from people’s ideas or their values, but rather from (1) the extent to which they interfere in other people’s relationships; (2) the degree to which they will constantly try to will others to change; and (3) their inability to continue a relationship with people who disagree with them.
• People cannot hear you unless they are moving toward you, which means that as long as you are in a pursuing or rescuing position, your message will never catch up, no matter how eloquently or repeatedly you articulate your ideas.
• The children who work through the natural difficulties of growing up with the least amount of difficulty are those whose parents made them least important to their own salvation.

(Edwin Friedman, A Failure of Nerve, 201-203)