Profiles of Power and Success

by Gene N. Landrum

"The Bell Curve is wrong," claims Gene Landrum. "In fact, too much money, education or IQ is counterproductive to achievement." How do creativity and entrepreneurial genius emerge? Are they acquired or inherited? According to Profiles of Power and Success, nurture, not nature, is at the root of all great success in life, and the world's great power brokers and creative geniuses are bred, not born. This high-powered volume shows that energized creative geniuses are self-motivated and driven individuals who learned how to be great. Written with the self-help audience in mind, this book will motivate all who dare to reach for success and power in their own lives.Landrum's examples of the highly talented concentrate on six distinctive outlets to realize individual creative Artistic Power - Frank Lloyd Wright and Pablo Picasso; Business Power - Helena Rubinstein and Rupert Murdoch; Entertainment Power - Isadora Duncan, Walt Disney, and Edith Piaf; Humanistic Power - Marquise de Sade, Maria Montessori, and Amelia Earhart; Political Power - Napoleon and Adolf Hitler; Technical Power - Nikola Tesla and Howard Hughes.

Genres: Business, Biography

420 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1996

Reviews

[Barb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although Profiles of Power and Success by Gene N. Landrum was published in 1996, the book can be useful for understanding the powerful men and women in today's world. Landrum investigates 12 powerful, successful individuals from the past and parses out their commonalities in order to create a roadmap for those who would like to raise successful kids or gain power for themselves. Some valuable and non-intuitive insights presented are: * "Most power brokers were hyperactive children." (If you want your high energy child to be exceptional, monitor but do not punish or drug.) * "Creative individuals can be more productive in their 70s than they were in their 20s." ( Most of the visionaries studied were too busy to die. A high-risk-taking subset were self-destructive though.) * "Continual crises conditioned them to take higher risks than the average person."( These powerful individuals thrived in continual chaos.) and * Too much money, education, and high IQ are counterproductive to high achievement. It must be noted that some of the individuals studied used their power in extremely negative ways and others for the advancement of society, so one must pick and choose carefully the traits to develop for oneself or ones offspring. The high achievers focused on in this book were: Napoleon Bonaparte, Walt Disney, Isadora Duncan, Amelia Earhart, Adolf Hitler, Howard Hughes, Maria Montessori, Rupert Murdoch, Edith Piaf, Pablo Picasso, Helena Rubinstein, Marquis de Sade, Frank Lloyd Wright and Nikola Tesla.