Ralph Crosby is a West Point graduate with Masters degrees from Harvard and the University of Geneva, Switzerland. He served as an aide to General Colin Powell and the Vice President of the United States before beginning his extraordinary industry career, where he was General Manager of the B-2 Program, the President of Northrop’s Integrated Systems Sector and subsequently Chairman and CEO of EADS North America.
Dave Oliver is an extraordinary story teller—and practitioner of the art of leadership. He has applied his considerable talents to create a powerful and practical compilation of real life experiences relevant to leaders at all levels. Oliver combines the reality of actual experiences with insightful analysis to reveal the multidimensional keys to effective leadership. His medium is vignettes of starkly real circumstances, in matters of considerable consequence, often of historical importance. In their narration, he clearly differentiates between mechanistic principles of management from the qualitative, human, judgment based qualities that enable the engagement and empowerment of people; thereby creating the alignment necessary to address the real life challenges of organizational performance. This is leadership in action. The bonus is that it contains untold military history that is informative to any student of the Cold War.
Ralph D. Crosby, Jr.