The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else by George Anders

Author:George Anders
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Human Resources & Personnel Management, Management, Careers, Business & Economics, General
ISBN: 9781591844259
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2011-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

7: What Can Go Right?

In the winter of 1960, Austrian cardinal Franz König got caught in the worst journey of his life. Vatican leaders wanted him to represent the church at the funeral of Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac of Yugoslavia. Traveling for hours along icy roads, König never reached his goal. About an hour north of the burial site, his Mercedes sedan skidded off course and smashed into an oncoming truck. The crash killed Konig’s driver and left the Austrian cardinal badly injured. Carried away unconscious, König awoke in an unfamiliar hospital, with his face heavily bandaged and his jaw wired shut. He couldn’t move his head.

Everything about the trip at that point was a total failure. Efforts to send Catholic dignitaries to the graveside were for naught. Cardinal Stepinac ended up being buried in obscurity. As König later told interviewers, he lay for days in his hospital bed, staring at a Communist portrait in his room, trying to find some rallying thought. At first nothing clicked.

Then König found his plan. Even if he hadn’t succeeded this time as the Vatican’s envoy of hope, König could try again. Somebody needed to connect believers throughout Europe, no matter how harsh conditions might be behind the Iron Curtain. He could become one of those connectors. In his memoirs, König described that hospital stay as “a crucial watershed in my life.”

Over the next eighteen years, König explored Eastern Europe with the zeal of a new priest getting to know his first parish. He celebrated mass in Warsaw. He consoled the elderly in Budapest. He kicked soccer balls at seminaries; he went for hikes with Polish bishops; he even toured a museum of atheism in Leningrad so he could better understand the Communist mind-set toward religion.

In this new mission, König gained deep insights into Eastern Europe’s leaders, including a charismatic younger cardinal in Poland, Karol Wojtyła. By the late 1970s, König was talking about Wojtyła as a possible future pope. Most other cardinals didn’t see that possibility. König persisted anyway. In October 1978, König prevailed. Thanks to the Austrian cardinal’s influence, the church picked its first non-Italian pontiff since 1522, gaining a leader who came to be seen as one of the strongest popes of all time.

The selection of Pope John Paul II is more than just an astonishing zigzag of fate. It’s a reminder that in a time of crisis, even an institution as deeply steeped in history as the Roman Catholic Church can be inspired to break with its past. In such situations, it’s possible for a few high-energy optimists to get everyone else thinking about new paths—and what can go right—rather than being governed by apprehensions about what could go wrong.

This is a chapter about the Franz Königs of the world: a rare breed of explorers whose lives are defined by the chance to roam beyond familiar territory. They enter the talent-hunting narrative only rarely: when an organization is so young, so carefree, or so caught up in crisis that it doesn’t intend to follow the careful, predictable methods that have been documented so far in this book.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.