Madeleine Albright, the first female U.S. Secretary of State, was a world-class leader who leaves behind several lessons for business executives.
Cox said that “As a woman in corporate roles for over 30 years, Madeleine Albright provided a vision of what an ‘older’ woman could do. Magdalena Johndrow is a financial advisor and the managing partner of Financial Johndrow Wealth Management. Johndrow recalled that Albright, “was famous for always wearing intricate brooches to important meetings. Organizational psychologist and executive coach Gena Cox, head of advisory and research at Feels Human Partners, thought that “Madeleine Albright showed the world that leaders must have a value system, a point-of-view, a ‘why’ as their North Star. That North Star can help you define your moral redline, and that redline can define your actions. He recalled that Albright said, “As a leader, you have to have the ability to assimilate new information and understand that there might be a different view.” Leadership doesn’t require that one have all the answers…or pretend to. “Her actions taught me that it’s not always what you say, but how you say it. Albright said, “Life is grim, and we don’t have to be grim all the time.” Leaders' actions are like ping-pong balls without such a compass, and they lose followership. “Running a profitable business is important. “Madeleine Albright's four decades at Georgetown University created almost two generations of world leaders who are all well-versed in diplomacy. Leadership requires flexibility and the willingness to adapt as we acquire new information. That’s what role models do, they shine the light that allows others to find their way,” she commented. "Condoleezza Rice saw that light and so did Hillary Clinton, quite literally following in her footsteps.
As Secretary of State, she foresaw the danger of Putin's rule even as she campaigned for NATO's expansion to Russia's borders.
“My deepest regret from my years in public service is the failure of the United States and the international community to act sooner to halt those crimes,” she wrote in her memoir, “Madam Secretary.” One of my favorite memories of Albright was from her seventy-fifth-birthday party, in 2012, organized by her twin daughters, Anne and Alice. The guest list was entirely female. She wore a giant bug after the Russians were caught tapping her State Department. Her collection of brooches —amassed from dime stores, flea markets, antique dealers, and upscale designers—became so legendary that the Smithsonian exhibited them. One of Albright’s legacies is the square and statue in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, honoring her role in what came to be known as “Madeleine’s war.” Time magazine described Kosovo as “ground zero in the debate over whether America should play a new role in the world, that of the indispensable nation asserting its morality as well as its interests to assure stability, stop thugs and prevent human atrocities.” In the Clinton Administration, Albright was a dogged supporter of NATO intervention to stop Serbian attacks on Kosovars seeking independence. They did a takeoff on the rivalries in “West Side Story.” Albright played Maria; Primakov was Tony. To the tune of “America,” the two bantered back and forth: After a Cuban pilot bragged about shooting down two civilian planes carrying four exiles, in 1996, she said, “This is not cojones,” the Spanish slang for testicles. “We leave America in 2001 safer,” she told me. “We will continue erasing—without replacing—the line drawn in Europe by Stalin’s bloody boot,” she said, in 1999. As almost a million people were slaughtered in Rwanda, in 1994, she famously shouted on a phone call from the U.N. to colleagues in Washington, “Goddammit, we have to do something!” President Bill Clinton opted out, and it haunted her. In a final Op-Ed for the Times—published a month before she died, of cancer, on Wednesday, at eighty-four—the former Secretary of State recalled her initial impressions of the Russian leader. Her family first fled Adolf Hitler’s Nazis and later Joseph Stalin’s Communists as they expanded deeper into Europe. She landed in Colorado at the age of eleven and became a U.S. citizen at the age of twenty. “Only in America could a refugee from Central Europe become Secretary of State,” she told newly minted U.S. citizens, decades later, at a naturalization ceremony.
The first woman to hold the position of U.S. Secretary Of State, has died at the age of 84. Madeleine Albright was the first woman to hold the role of U.S. ...
From Kabul to Kyiv and beyond, women and girls are on the front lines in the struggle for freedom and human dignity. On this— Madeleine Albright (@madeleine) #InternationalWomensDaymy heart is with all those fighting for a better, peaceful and more equal future. It was the honor of my life to serve the American people by defending their interests and values around the world. Passing by the portraits of my predecessors, I could feel the walls shake just a little— Madeleine Albright (@madeleine) https://t.co/fpkHBuolTw January 23, 2022 Madeleine Albright was the first woman to hold the role of U.S. Secretary Of State and has passed away after battling cancer. In a statement, Albright’s family says “we are heartbroken to announce the 64th U-S secretary of state and the first woman to hold that position passed away earlier today”
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has died at age 84. But many of the foreign policy concepts she helped bring to the post-Cold War world remain.
The advisability of NATO enlargement will be hotly debated for years to come and Albright’s role in the process should not be spared scrutiny. Now that rival states are more willing to punch back, it is far riskier for U.S. leaders to perform the role of indispensable nation. It is understandable, perhaps, that she wanted to harness this awesome power toward causes such as nurturing freedom and democracy in countries that had struggled for decades to rid themselves of authoritarianism. It would be Albright’s lasting regret that the U.S. failed to intervene in Rwanda in 1994 and stop the slaughter. She saw the alliance as a conduit through which the United States could impart peace, order and good governance upon a fragile European continent. When the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, so did the primary justification for America’s enormous troop presence abroad and globe-spanning web of military alliances.
Madeleine Albright, who fled the Nazis as a child in her native Czechoslovakia during World War II and rose to become the first female US secretary of state ...
She was not in the line of succession for the presidency, however, because she was a native of Czechoslovakia. At the time, she was the highest-ranking woman in the history of the US government. - At the time, she was the highest-ranking woman in the history of US government
Diplomat and scholar of international relations who served as the first female US secretary of state.
When George W Bush was elected president in 2000, Albright slipped back comfortably into her role as a popular member of the establishment, greatly in demand as a speaker at conferences. Clinton appointed her in 1997, at the beginning of his second term. Madeleine Albright took a master’s degree, then a doctorate in international relations at Columbia University, New York, where Brzezinski was one of her teachers. The sanctions policy had been in place long before the Clinton administration, but the comment was not forgotten. When working a summer vacation shift at the Denver Post, she met a scion of one of the most powerful American newspaper dynasties of the time, Joseph Albright, descendant of the founder of the Chicago Tribune. They married in 1959. The truth seems to be that she was genuinely ignorant of her Jewish heritage.
As Clinton's top diplomat, Albright led US efforts to broker Israel-Palestinian, Israel-Syria peace; she described discovering her Jewish heritage late in ...
He appointed her as US ambassador to the UN in 1993. As secretary of state, she played a key role in persuading Clinton to go to war against the Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic over his treatment of Kosovar Albanians in 1999. Albright married journalist Joseph Albright, a descendant of Chicago’s Medill-Patterson newspaper dynasty, in 1959. They had three daughters and divorced in 1983. At the time, she was the highest-ranking woman in the history of US government. Her family fled Czechoslovakia in 1939 as the Nazis took over their country, and she spent the war years in London. Albright’s parents converted from Judaism to Catholicism in 1941. We are viewed in the Middle East as a colonial power and our motives are suspect.” Three of her Jewish grandparents died in concentration camps. She helped win Senate ratification of NATO’s expansion and a treaty imposing international restrictions on chemical weapons. Albright graduated from Wellesley College in 1959. In 2013, she published “Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War,” a memoir tracing the Jewish heritage of her parents and the fate of 25 relatives she lost in the Holocaust. In a Washington Post interview, she likened the revelation of her Jewish past to being handed a gift to unwrap. Albright remained outspoken through the years.
Albright was the US representative to the UN and secretary of state under President Bill Clinton.
“Madeline Albright was one of my earliest lessons in the bankruptcy of identity politics. But she argued that the country did not pose an immediate threat to the US and called for keeping focus on defeating al-Qaeda. “It was a stupid statement. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.” “We are heartbroken to announce that Dr. Madeleine K. Albright, the 64th US Secretary of State and the first woman to hold that position, passed away earlier today. She was in the post until 2001.
Albright, who arrived in the U.S. as an 11-year-old refugee, became the first woman to serve as secretary of state. She died on Wednesday at the age of 84.
"So I went up to him and I said, 'Can you believe that a refugee is secretary of state?' " "She turned to me as a counselor and said, 'Could you organize the State Department to talk about Islam?' " Sherman said. "It was an indication of her ability to be political." "But it had nothing to do with her getting the job." "She was happy to wield it in her own way." "Madeleine said to him, 'When your government names a woman to head the delegation, I will spend considerable time with her as well.' " Albright, at 4 feet 10 inches tall, stood out in her cherry suit and pearls in the all-male group. Albright had a long and storied career in foreign policy, serving as U. S. ambassador to the United Nations from 1993-97 before reaching the pinnacle of diplomacy: secretary of state. "This all started when ... Saddam Hussein called me a serpent," Albright told NPR in 2009. "As difficult as it might seem, I want every stage of my life to be more exciting than the last." It would never have happened, but I would have felt better about my own role in this." "She said, 'Where's Wonder Woman?' So they did a Wonder Woman comic book as well.
WASHINGTON — Madeleine Albright was the quintessential late 20th-century Jewish diplomat, haunted by the Holocaust and determined to use what tools her adopted ...
“The epitome of mensch in the best and broadest sense of the word.” That led to difficult questions: If Albright knew she was Jewish in 1993 or 1994, why did she not reveal it until 1997, when a newspaper was about to go public? “Maybe she was afraid that her stature would be diminished before her international colleagues if they knew of her Jewish roots. Maybe she felt her aspirations to become secretary of state would be jeopardized if her family history was confirmed.” Her optimism may have blinded her to how deeply embedded in Iran’s political culture was its resistance to compromise. Netanyahu planned a dramatic signal that he was ready to leave the talks. Albright, an early backer of Bill Clinton when he was a relatively unknown Arkansas governor, was his first U. N. ambassador, repayment in part for the money she helped raise for his campaign. She was behind Clinton’s decision to confront the Serbian military in 1999 as it bore down on Kosovo. Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic once told her, “Madam Secretary, you are not well informed.” Albright, whose father Josef Korbel, had served as a diplomat in Belgrade, countered, “Don’t tell me I’m uninformed — I lived here.” In 1998, at U. S.-mediated talks with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat at Wye River, Maryland, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was resisting concessions as Bill Clinton sought to advance the Oslo Accords Netanyahu had reviled. She lobbied for airstrikes against Serbian targets, once telling Colin Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Powell, famous for his Vietnam-era-founded reluctance for military intervention, said the question nearly caused him an “aneurysm.” “This is cowardice.” She called State Department bureaucrats, whom she never fully trusted, “The White Boys.” Albright was adept at outmaneuvering statesmen — always men — who thought they knew much better than she did.