Chapter 7. FROM OUR LEADERS

 

The secret of a leader lies in the tests he has faced over the whole course of his life and the habit of action he develops in meeting those tests.

 
 --Gail Sheehy

Shortly before 10 A.M. on September 11, aboard United Flight 93, a cell phone relayed the final words of a 32-year-old account manager for the Oracle Corporation. What had started out as his routine trip to a San Francisco meeting had become a confrontation with hijackers aiming the Boeing 757 at Washington, D.C., with the White House or the Capitol as likely targets. Several passengers banded together “to do something about it [the hijacking]” as one of them told his wife over a cell phone. In the final minutes, the account manager, Todd Beamer, recited the ...

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