SUCCESSFUL CEO MARRIAGES
Bennis: I noticed something else, which I had no way of accounting for, in that first study I did on leadership. Of those ninety leaders, sixty were on the corporate side, the other thirty on the public service or government side; forty of the sixty were in the Fortune 500. Of those forty Fortune 500 CEO’s, thirty-eight of them were still not only married to their first spouses, but wildly enthusiastic about the institution of marriage, which fascinated me. I later went back to talk to some of those forty and I said, “Look you’re an exception right now in this country. You’ve been married for twenty-five or thirty or forty years. How do you explain this? Why?” And the answer I got from those I spoke with was “I can always depend on my spouse to give me reflective back talk.” From Reinventing Leadership, by Warren Bennis and Robert Townsend
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