Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the leaders notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. Dr. Rutland is a world renowned leadership expert. He is a New York Times best selling author and he has served as the president of two universities. The Leaders Notebook is brought to you by Global Servants. For more information about Global Servants, please Visit our website globalservants.org Here is your host, Dr. Mark Rutland.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: If you've got your Bibles, if you'll take those. It's an odd passage to start with if you're going to teach on the life of King David. But now let's turn to the last page of the book of ruth. Ruth, chapter four. I want to begin reading at verse 18. Ruth, chapter four, verse 18.
Now these are the generations of Pharez. And Pharez begat Hezron, and Hezron begat Ram, and Ram begat Amminadab. And Amminadab begot nation and Naashon begot Salmon, and Salmon begat Boaz and. And Boaz begat Obed. And Obed begot Jesse, and Jesse begot David.
Now to the next page, to the next book, if you will turn to 1 Samuel, chapter 16, 1 Samuel. Just turn a few pages over to chapter 16.
And the Lord said unto Samuel, that is Samuel the prophet, of course. And the Lord said unto Samuel, how long wilt thou mourn for Saul, seeing I have rejected him from reigning over Israel?
Fill thine horn with oil and go, I will send thee to Jesse the Bethlehemite, for I have provided me a king among his sons.
And Samuel said, how can I go? If Saul hear it, he will kill me. And the Lord said, take an heifer with thee and say, I am come to sacrifice unto the Lord.
And call Jesse to the sacrifice. And I will show thee what thou shalt do. And thou shalt anoint unto me him whom I name unto thee.
David is an extraordinary, one of those extraordinary people.
Our son recently preached a brilliant message at his church in Georgia called Ordinary People. It was a good message and important for the likes of us, saying, you know, you don't have to be a superhero to serve the Lord. It was a great message.
David was not an ordinary person.
As one studies David, one realizes that had he been born into almost any epoch of human history, he would have been one of the great figures of that time.
He was a multifaceted genius in a wide variety of ways. He was a musician, both an instrumentalist and a singer.
David was so famous as a child singer that when Saul the king in Gilgal was so demonically oppressed that he couldn't Sleep at night.
David, who was a small boy in a remote village called Bethlehem, was his voice. The beauty of his voice was already so well known that somebody got him all the way to Gilgal to sing the king to sleep at night. David won the Hebrew version of the voice.
He.
He was a poet.
Most of the Psalms are divots.
Think now he was born on the cusp between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age.
The first iron weapon mentioned in the Bible is Goliath's sword.
The end of the Bronze age, we're talking 3,000 years ago. David was already ancient history when Jesus was born.
David was born a thousand years before the start of the Roman Empire.
And yet poetry that he wrote in another language at the end of the Bronze Age still touches us deeply and profoundly.
A musician, a poet, a warrior.
He was a creative warrior, won battles that when you read about the strategy and the tactics that he used, was incredible. And I did some research one time to try to find out how many people David had killed in his life or through him personally or through his extended agencies, his armies, or whatever. When I got into the tens of thousands, I just dropped it.
David was a man of war and of blood and of violence and a sensitive poet and a singer and. And a businessman, a wealthy man. At the time of his death, David was one of the wealthiest men in the Middle East.
He was also a politician. He consolidated the tribes of Israel following a civil war. He was a city founder. He established the city of Jerusalem as the new nation, as the new capital of the nation of Israel. And by the way, in passing, I always say this, Jerusalem has never been the capital of any other country.
And it is. It is one of the stellar accomplishments of King David that He established Jerusalem 3,000 years ago.
He ran one of the first documented capital campaigns to pay. To pay for a building.
He raised the money for the temple that was to be called Solomon's Temple through a classical capital campaign. It's recorded in two Samuel. They have a top giver, then the next givers and the next givers. And finally it says the common people gave gladly because their leaders had given generously. The number one giver, the number one giver on Solomon's Temple was Diamond himself.
And he was a man of some humility in a unique way. He raised all the money, stockpiled all the material, and had the architectural plans for the temple, knowing it would never be named for him. It's not never going to be called David's Temple. It was going to be Solomon's Temple. And all Solomon had to do was put together all the Lego pieces.
It was David that that managed to accumulate all that.
A fascinating and intriguing man, a man with a complicated genealogy himself.
I read the passage that we read specifically.
David's great great grandmother was not Jewish.
She was.
She was a Canaanite hooker.
They converted. She was Rahab the harlot.
David's great great grandmother converted and her husband was Salmon.
Now we don't know this, but it appeals to my romantic heart.
Salmon was one of Joshua's soldiers, if you remember, the spies that went in and spied out the land. They stayed in at Rahab's, I believe, after the fall of Jericho. And Rahab's family was saved. I think one of those spies went back and married her. But we do know he was. Whether he was one of the spies or not, he was one of Joshua's soldiers and his grandmother was Ruth.
So in his immediate genealogy, only four generations before him were, are two Gentile women.
David is an extraordinary commodity.
Born in a tiny village at the end of the Bronze Age and 3,000 years later, listen to this. When Jesus of Nazareth walked the streets of Jerusalem and the sick people cried out, what did they say? Heal me, Jesus, son of David.
He is one of the critical persons of biblical and geopolitical history.
It's impossible really, to understand the Bible apart from David.
It is not in the Bible, but it is Jewish tradition that David was born on Pentecost and died on Pentecost.
There is some hint of that in the Book of Acts.
When St. Peter is preaching the great Pentecostal message. He says David died and is buried and his tomb is here with us on Mount Zion, meaning on Mount Zion now.
So, and that's on the day of Pentecost. So why would he reference David on the day of Pentecost except for that Jewish tradition, which we don't know.
So having said all that, what about David the man?
So the first thing I want to say is this.
David had such a hugely complicated life. He only lived to be 70 years old.
And David squeezed lifetimes into those 70 years.
He endured the radical vicissitudes of his life with an amazing flexibility.
David seemed to be able to do what he had to do in every phase of his life, but not get trapped there.
In other words, he kept his eye on the prize.
The prize was David was called to his destiny, given to him by God. As a small boy in his father's house, David kept his eyes on. On being the king of the United Kingdom of Israel. And the establishment of Jerusalem.
But between his anointing in his father's house and when he became the king, his life was just an amazing waves of change.
So let's look at the beginning, the passage we read.
Samuel, the prophet is told by God, I'm through with Saul.
I've rejected Saul. He's no longer the king. The only problem is, in the physical realm, he is the king, but in God's eyes, he's not the king.
So God says, I'm going to find a new king, someone after my own heart. And he says, he's in Bethlehem. Go to Bethlehem, go to Jesse's house and anoint one of his sons, the one I point out, and as king, and he'll be the king. Samuel says, lord, there's this issue.
That's sedition, that's treason.
While there is a king, if the prophet anoints a new king, that's treason. He should be executed.
But it is testimony to God saying, I don't count the physical.
Saul is king, but he's not king in my eyes.
And David is not yet king. But he is king in my eyes.
And he also, Saul looks like a king. He's ahead and showed the tallest man in Israel he looked like a king.
David is a skinny little kid, it says his nose is sunburned.
And a shepherd in his father's farm.
And he doesn't look like a king. And he isn't the king, but he is the king.
Saul is the king and looks like a king, but he's not the king.
And God says, I don't see things in the natural realm. I see things that are. That nobody else can see.
So David is in the field.
A man comes and says, you, father wants you to come to the house.
David does not know anything that's gone on at the house.
Samuel, the prophet, has arrived.
The elders from Bethlehem are there. Jesse is there.
And Samuel says, I'm going to anoint one of your sons as the king.
And all of them come, Amminadab, Eliab, they all come one after the other. Before Samuel and Samuel, God says, not him, not him, not him, not him.
And then Samuel asks Jesse one of the funniest questions in the whole Bible. Not everybody thinks the Bible's funny. There's some funny stuff.
He says, are you sure these are your sons?
And Jesse says, okay, there is another one.
But he's odd.
You see, David's family thought he was an kind of a weird little kid at best, and maybe a pathological liar.
The little kid goes into the pasture to take care of the sheep. He comes home one day and he says, a lion came today to attack the sheep. They said, a lion? What'd you do? He said, oh, I punched it with my little fist and killed it.
They said, sure you did.
And the next day, a bear came to them. Oh, a bear. A bear.
What'd you do? Punched it with my fist and killed it.
This is not in the Bible, but this is what I believe happened. I think Eliab, his oldest brother, said, let me tell you something, sport. The next time you kill some big ugly creature, you cut its head off and lay his head at my feet and I'll believe you.
Hold that thought.
Now, David comes into the house. There's this strange old man, his dad, all his brothers, the elders of the village of Bethlehem. And this old man pours oil on his head and says, you're the new king of Israel, and leaves.
That's how David's childhood ends. From that moment, David's child, he is transformed. His whole life is turned upside down.
Then comes the story of Goliath. Will not go through that. Everybody in the room knows the story of David and Goliath. But when David kills Goliath, it says he killed him with the stone. But do you remember what he did next? He took Goliath's sword and cut his head off.
I think he took that head and threw it at Eliab's feet and said, how's that for a big ugly monster?
Now, from that moment on, David is an international celebrity.
Nobody in the Middle east is loved and loathed like David. The Philistines hate him above any person that has ever fought against them. In Israel, the Philistines despised David. He killed their champion and mutilated his dead body. And they hate him.
And Israel loves him. And the king Saul is nervous over this love.
He just.
He feels David is a threat to his being king or to his son Jonathan being king.
So he is promised that David will be married to his oldest daughter.
Saul welches on the deal right from the beginning. He doesn't give David his oldest daughter. He gives David the second one. Michael and Michael. I don't want to go into it today, but Michael is a tragic figure.
She's one of those women in life whose lives are just basically destroyed by powerful men around her. And she ends a tragic, sad, bitter old woman.
But really it's because of the men in her life, David and Saul and her husband, her second husband.
Saul then tries to kill David twice. And David has to flee in the Night, he goes first to Samuel at Ramah, where he hides out. And I won't go into it in detail, but he is protected there, supernaturally.
Supernaturally protected. When Saul finds out he's there and sends military up there to get him multiple times. And finally Saul tries to get him, and God protects him supernaturally. And he doesn't stay there. He's been protected. And he makes one of the most inexplicable decisions. I just marvel over it. If I ever get to see him in heaven, I'm going to ask him what was up with that.
Because having been supernaturally protected at Rama, he leaves Rama and goes to Gaths.
To Gath.
Who can tell me who's the most famous person ever born at Gath?
Say it out loud.
Goliath.
Goliath, whom David has just killed and chopped his head off.
And he goes to Gath. Does he think they're going to make him mayor?
It's just amazing to me. Of course they capture him and put him in prison, and they're going to kill him.
But David remembers a Philistine superstition that is bad luck to kill a madman. And David feigns madness. He drops on the ground, throws dirt on his head, howls like a dog, scratches the walls. And the king Achish says, get. Get this crazy guy out of here. I don't want this. And they drive him out with stones. That's the low point.
That's the low point of David's life.
He. He is alone.
How humiliating that must have been.
And he flees into the Judean wilderness, where he lives in a network of caverns called the Cave at Adullam.
And there he says, if I'm going to be an outlaw, I'm going to be the best outlaw, in other words, to do what has to be done here, but keep my eye on the ultimate prize.
God begins to bring to David in the wilderness men who are fleeing their lives. These are not the cream of the crop. These are some tough guys. They won't pay their child support.
They run off and they join David, 600 of them. They are called the Giborim. Gibor in Hebrew means mighty.
So gibborim is the plural of that, the mighty ones.
And they are David's personal private army.
They are not loyal to Israel. They are loyal to David. He's there. He's their chieftain and their king. And he becomes an outlaw in the Araba in the south of the Middle east there. And he becomes one of the most. He and his 600 men become one of the most powerful men military forces in the area.
One reason is because David trains them himself in an unusual way. He trains all 600 to be entirely ambidextrous.
Now, that doesn't mean much if you're fighting with an AK47, but if you're fighting hand to hand combat with swords and knives, it's huge. So you're fighting a guy with your right hand, and he cuts your arm and you drop the sword. He thinks he's got you, and you draw a sword with your left hand. And you're just as good with your left hand as you are with your right. So in other words, he turned 600 men almost into 1200.
Now he goes back to Gath, and this time he's got something to sell one of the most dangerous cavalry units in the Middle east, and they hire him as a mercenary.
So David now sells his sword to the enemy of his own nation, to the Philistines.
The Philistine king, Achish, loves David and wants him to be with him. So he thinks to himself, if I can get David to raid into Israel and kill Israelis, he can't ever go home. He'll have to stay with me.
So he tells David, go into Israel, raid villages, bring the loot and bring it back to me and we'll split the loot.
So David takes his men and they trick Achish. They raid north up into Israel, but they don't hit any villages. They go south, down by the Dead Sea, down into the Araba. They go down into Amalekite territory and they raid Amalekite villages.
And I'm just telling you the truth, they kill all the witnesses. There's no satellite pictures, nobody can tell. So they kill everybody, take all the loot, go back up into Israel, come down and they say to Achish, you see, we're coming back from Israel. This is all the stuff we got from villages. And he thinks they've raided in Israel.
Akish then gives them the village of Ziklag, and he says, this is your town now.
And David goes there.
He's an outlaw. He's going to be a good outlaw. He's going to be a mercenary. He's going to be a good mercenary. He gets Ziklag. He's going to be a local chieftain of a town in the Middle East. He's going to be a good chieftain.
The Amalekites now, when David and his men are gone, decide to give David a taste of his own medicine, and they raid Ziklag.
They burn the town down, take all the dependents, all the women and children and leave.
It's an interesting moment.
It just says, his men determined to kill him.
Now, I'm not trying to frighten you, Pastor, but it's one of the truths of leadership is that in some kind of a crisis or an emergency, people look for somebody to blame.
And who they want to blame is leadership. And they're going to kill David. And there's this one line. This is one of the great verses in the Bible that tells us so much and doesn't tell us enough.
It just says, and David encouraged himself in the Lord.
Great, right?
Wouldn't you like to know how?
What did he do to encourage himself in the Lord? But he did. He gathers his men, comes up with a plan. He says, they are burdened down with our dependence. They can't travel as fast as we can. Everybody mount up. They find the Amalekites. They get their people back. They kill the Amalekites.
By that time, the civil war has happened. Jonathan's dead. Saul's dead. And the tribe of Judah, which is David's tribe, calls him to come and be the king of Judah, to break away from Israel and just be the king of Judah. And he goes and he sets up his capital at Hebron, the tribal capital of Judah.
But that's not his destiny.
He's going to be a good local king, but that's not his destiny. He knows his destiny is ahead of him.
Now, listen to this.
I was 16 years a college president in two different colleges.
And I used to deal a lot with young people. And I loved the little brats. I really did.
I mean, our beloved students. And often they ask the same question. It would say, I know God has called me to be into the office of a prophet. I know I'm supposed to be a pastor. I know I'm supposed to be the CEO of a big company. I know I'm supposed to found something there. All these things. And they would say, what do you think I should do? I always said the same thing.
Pass English.
You're here. You're here at the university. Yes, your destiny is ahead. But you got to do this well.
You've got to be able to do what you're doing here well, and keep your eye on the ultimate prize. That was one of the creative geniuses of David.
Now, finally, the whole tribe, all the tribes come to David. And David is asked to be the king of the United Kingdom of Israel.
And David makes the decision that our founding fathers also made when they when the colonies became the United States of America, they needed a new capital.
They said, if we put it in Virginia, then Virginia will look like the prime state.
They didn't put it in Virginia. Thank God they didn't put it in New York.
And they said, we're going to carve off an area that's not a state.
So no state will have the capital.
And they carved off the District of Columbia, Washington, and in the District of Columbia so that no state would own the capital. David says, if I make the capital at Hebron, Judah will think they're the top tribe. If I put it at Gilgal, Benjamin will think they're the top tribe. So he conquered the Jebusite stronghold of Jebus and turned it into Jerusalem. And Jerusalem became the capital of the new. Of the new country of Israel, or the reconstituted country of Israel.
Now let's deal with something.
David and Bathsheba.
There's no getting around. You can't talk about the life of David without talking about this horrible affair.
There are people that know the story of David and Bathsheba. They don't even know it's in the Bible. They think it's Shakespeare.
When David became the king, he seduced the wife of one of his top and most trusted generals, Uriah, and he seduced Bathsheba. She is not to blame here. Well, I mean, she didn't have to give in. It wasn't forcible rape. But it's on David. Let's be clear. This is the classical story of a man of power and prestige and position who seduces a vulnerable and lonely woman.
He brings her to his palace. He seduces her. It's on him.
She gets pregnant in the affair.
And so David calls Urah the Hittite home from the battlefield on some ostensible purpose, thinking that he will probably, while he's home, go spend the night with his wife. And David's going to palm his baby off on Uriah.
But Uriah has more character than David does.
Uriah says, I can't go to bed with my wife while my soldiers are sleeping in foxholes. I can't do that. But he says, I'm home.
I may as well try to do something useful. I'll lie down outside your bedroom door, your majesty, and I'll be your personal bodyguard for the night. When. What a man.
David repays him by sending a note with him back to Joab, his kinsman. And he says, put Uriah out in the front of the battle and retreat suddenly and get him killed. And as soon as he's dead, write to me.
So now he has committed adultery, impregnated the wife of a friend, conspiracy and murder.
He sweeps it under the rug, and everybody's willing for it to. Nobody wants to make a deal with the king, so they.
Nobody wants to deal with the arithmetic. Okay, Bathsheba. They get married quickly, and Bathsheba's birth is premature.
And everybody blinks until this prophet Nathan shows up.
And Nathan comes before David and tells him this cockamamie story about a man who steals another man's lamb.
And David is outraged.
He freaks out over this story.
Look, it's not a story about murder. He steals a guy's lamb, and David says, he deserves to die. I've tried to think, why did David get so freaked out over that story?
I think it was because when Nathan showed up, something inside David said, this is going bad.
I remember when I was a kid, I was a naughty kid. And in the old days, they actually punished you at school. I don't know if any of you remember this. And I would get sent to the principal's office. Sometimes you'd dodge the bullet, and the teacher would say, all right.
You go to the. It was somebody else. It wasn't me. Somebody else. And not always. Yeah, I always loved it when somebody else. So I think David said, this guy's terrible.
And he says, he deserves to die.
And Nathan looks the king in the eyes and says, you're right. He deserves to die. You're the man.
He said, I know everything you did. God revealed to me what you did with Bathsheba and Uriah the Hittite, and you're the man.
Can you imagine that?
This is not a 21st century republic. This is a. He's an emperor. His word is law.
All he has to do is say to Joab, kill him.
Joab's his kinsman. Joab's his trigger man.
He's a tough guy. I always used to say to the kids at the university, if David was Wyatt Earp, Joab was Doc Holliday. He's a very dangerous hombre. He will bust a cap in you for a quarter.
And all David has to do is say, kill him. Joab's got his hand on the. On the. On the sword. He's ready to kill Nathan. And David says, he's right.
I did it.
And he confesses and repents.
It's tough. The baby dies. The baby that was conceived in that affair dies. And God said the baby would die, but the next baby is Solomon.
Now, in David, we learn in David's, sin. We learn something. It's huge.
David's sin does not give us permission to sin. His repentance teaches us how to repent.
David writes Psalm 51, and he doesn't mention Bathsheba. He. He doesn't say, lord, it was bad. What I did was bad. But that woman, she shouldn't have been on that rooftop. You and I both know that.
He never mentions her. He says, against thee and thee only have I sinned and done that which is evil in thy sight.
He confesses his sin. It's him.
And I believe when he took that psalm to Asaph the Seer and said, I want this red. And in the tabernacle on Shabbat, I think Asaph said, you, Majesty, please, let's don't read this.
Let's.
Sounds like Bathsheba.
And David says, it's about Bathsheba. And he adds the superscription. David wrote Psalm 51 when he went in unto Bathsheba.
He says to Asaph, I want my sin remembered as long as the Bible is read.
David confesses it publicly for us 3,000 years later.
But then he writes about it.
Listen, this is a thousand years before Christ. And he writes about it like Christian apologetics.
He says, wash me with hyssop and I shall be clean. He's pleading the blood a thousand years before the cross.
And then he says, he talks about the sanctifying grace of the Holy Spirit. Take not thy Holy Spirit from me. Renew a right spirit within me. Cleanse my mind, cleanse my heart. Wash me in the blood.
David. David has sinned, this horrible sin. And now it has the revelation of the Holy Spirit in such a magnificent way.
So let me begin to close with this. Stay with me.
Now we come to this huge question.
Why is David called a man after God's own heart?
That's. I mean, that's huge.
This guy with this complicated life, war and battle, and this terrible sin and tragedy and everything else is complicated life. He's not only called a man after God's own heart in the Old Testament, a thousand years after his death, knowing everything that he did, St. Paul calls him a man after God's own heart.
He is referenced in the Pentecostal sermon in Acts, chapter two.
Why?
I think David was like one of these big, strong Southeastern Conference fullbacks who come at you downhill.
I think he just was fastened on the prize.
He had his eyes on the goal line.
Those guys, those big, strong running backs like that, you can tackle them. They're not impossible. You can bring them down, but they're going to fall for three and a half yards.
They're falling forward. I think that was David.
He fell, but he fell forward. He fell toward grace. He fell toward the.
Toward confession. David, David, his eyes on one thing. He was after the heart of God in pursuit of the heart of God.
So one last question.
In the rabbinical list of Old Testament prophets, David is listed as a prophet.
Why?
I think part of the reason is the Psalms.
I think.
Think of Psalm 23 in two of the world's major religions. The most comforting devotional masterpiece in Judaism and in Christianity is Psalm 23. Three thousand years later, it still moves us deeply.
But let me give you a Christian answer as we close Psalm 22.
When Jesus is hanging on the cross in unutterable agony, dying, in his last breaths, he cries out in Hebrew, eli, eli Lamar shabbachtani.
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
It's a quote from Psalm 22.
In Psalm 22, David, a thousand years before Jesus describes the death on the cross.
He says, my bones protrude. They stab me in the side.
They cast lots. They shoot dice for my clothes.
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Was it prophetic? Listen, when you're hanging on the cross in unspeakable pain, you're not trying to think of some clever quote.
It is the power of the Holy Spirit crying up through him. That which God revealed to David a thousand years earlier.
He described death on the cross a thousand years before Rome invented the act of crucifixion and a thousand years before the soldiers gambled for Jesus. Clothes at the foot of the cross.
David complicated a complex genius, a man who gained the ability to recreate himself in every situation and circumstance of life, but kept his eyes on the ultimate prize of the destiny to which God has called him and in whose life we can find grace and strength even today.
So I'll finish.
I went to undergraduate school at the University of Maryland during Lincoln's first term.
And it's really rude.
And I took a course in literature. And my professor was a very outspoken and bitter atheist.
Any reference in anything about religion or anything, he just blasted it.
Finally, we came to the poetry section, and one girl in the room said, you've talked about this quality of poetry, that quality, this kind of thing. What do you think is the best poem ever written? He said, well, I don't want to deal with that. No. She said, no, we just want to know, what do you think is the best poem ever written? The greatest poem ever written.
He said, all right, I'll tell you.
It's Psalm 23.
We were gobsmacked.
The whole semester he's been telling us there's no God.
And she persisted. She said, why?
He said, all right, you ask me, I'll tell you.
He said, I'm a secular Jew. I'm an atheist.
I'm not a religious Jew. He said, my wife is a lapsed Catholic.
He said, our two year old died of sids.
We got up one morning and our baby girl was dead in the crib from sudden infant death syndrome.
We were devastated.
And my wife insisted on having a Catholic priest at the graveside service.
He said, I was furious.
I did not want that priest at the graveside of my dead baby.
But she insisted. And he came.
And he said, as they lowered that little coffin into the ground, that old Padre recited the 23rd Psalm.
He said, the 23rd Psalm is not in the Christian New Testament.
He said, it's in my Bible.
It's my psalm. I learned the 23rd Psalm as a little boy.
He said, that priest repeated the 23rd Psalm.
And standing there by the grave of my little dead baby, for just a second, I believed there was a God in Israel.
He said, if just even for a moment, a man who lived 3,000 years ago can make an atheist Jew believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel.
That's the greatest poem ever written.
Well, let's pray.
Lord, we thank you for this time together. Pray that somehow, through the life of David and the Spirit which empowered him, we may gain grace and strength for our own lives.
In Jesus name, amen.
[00:40:07] Speaker A: You've been listening to the leader's notebook with Dr. Mark Gruppo. You can follow Dr. Rutland on X at Dr. MarkRutland or visit his website, drmarkrutland.com where you can find information about his materials and his app. Join us next week for another episode of the Leader's Notebook.
