Great post @kyriacos!

I have been reading the comments and... I don't understand, people. You get an honest account from a person who has apparently been twice in important leadership positions. One of the very rare instances where a person in a leadership position would rather lose the fame, the admiration, the followers, all for the sake of teaching people the value of individuality, and your only answer is "it depends how you view it - you might not be a good leader"? So who exactly is a good leader? One who is "diplomatic" enough to agree with everybody, always? I know "good" leaders like that. They are double-faced. Their mission in life is to get everyone to like them and make them feel important. How about one who "inspires"? If people need leaders to get inspired, we have just pinpointed humanity's problem. They can't think for themselves, they can't inspire themselves, they can't act for themselves. They are always waiting for someone else. And because it's part of human nature, that someone else will naturally act upon their own personal needs first. It seems that people deserve to be manipulated, because that is the kind of leader they choose, even here: the soft-speaking "inspirational" diplomat over the honest freethinker who would rather see people question him than admire him.

These ugly truths will never be admitted by any leader, because people would react just like in the comments below. They are hard truths nobody likes and instead of taking the advice seriously, you undermine the author's skills or tell him he is just being negative. This has nothing to do with skills, or positive thinking. Strong-minded people naturally draw followers- and enemies. The point is how they decide to deal with this: try to teach their followers how to be true to themselves at the expense of their own fame, or teach them how to be good sheep, which comes naturally easy. It now seems to me that even followers prefer the latter, or they wouldn't have become followers in the first place.