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I want to share this excerpt from an excerpted transcript of a July 13, 2006 audio recording. I downloaded the whole doc from Brian Robertson’s blog, “Enlightened Business” and found this jewel of a story:

“A colleague of mine spoke at a big leadership conference many years back. It was one of these big things where they had ex-presidents, Jack Welch and other big names and leaders. The people attending the conference had an evaluation sheet to determine the speaker with the most impact. The person who won, with by far the most votes, was Mother Theresa. She just happened to be in town that week so the conference organizers asked her to stop by and say a few words at the end of the conference. She listened for a while to all of these leaders of major corporations, talking and talking about how do we change our people? How can we get them to focus on results?

"At the end Mother Teresa went up to the podium and said something like ‘I don’t know much about leadership, but I do know this. You want to change your people? Do you know them? And, do you love them? If you don’t know them and you don’t love them, you are not going to change them.’”

The simplicity, beauty, and paradoxical nature of this assertion tickle me.