Leadership

I am a horrible procrastinator. The upside of this is that I perform quite well under pressure. As an example, I've had well over a month to write a measly 4 page paper on Jon Krakauer's book, Into Thin Air, a gripping tale of the 1996 Everest disaster. I tore through the book within 2 days of receiving it and put off writing the paper until the final day. It is now 1am on the due date, and I've just finished. I even wasted all weekend thinking I would write the paper during that time (I did think about it a lot, which made tonight's task easier). So now I'm all wound up and I have to go to work tomorrow morning. Uhg!

Anyway, the point here is that I have a question for you. I rarely ask questions, so I hope you will all indulge me here. The assignment was to identify effective and ineffective leaders in the book. So without doing the background reading, I'd love to get your thoughts on this.

What characterizes an effective leader?

I will probably be quite busy for a while, so blogging will be sporadic in the meantime.