Covert leadership gets dramatized and critiqued to permit the victims and bystanders, you and me, to recognize its symptoms and challenge its actions. Here is a story (along with overview Notes) in which the new president of a Board of Trustees harbors a concealed agenda. He advances it by covertly redirecting the organization's members and activities. A Board of trustees is grabbed away from trustee influence by a sequence of such unique moves that no alarm is raised. Board members remain annoyed, puzzled, ignorant, and helpless. Here we can witness covert leadership in action through one-on-one dialog. This story reveals his methods by following his conversations. We see how the story's protagonist, initially the Board's president, deals to himself the necessary cards and then plays them deftly, if somewhat brutally, to achieve sole control of institution policy, a control that extends well beyond his term of office. By following the action in this story as it is presented in dialog form the reader learns how covert leadership gets done. A town council, a community college, fraternity, museum, orchestra, Masonic group, opera company, Knights of Columbus chapter, or parish church all face this takeover risk. Nonprofit, not-for-profit, and local governmental institutions attract members who are parents, artists, local professionals, local industrial managers, community leaders, and so forth. This book addresses itself to the victims and their peers who, as trustees, suffer while strange maneuvers float about them. They find themselves helpless to understand those maneuvers and to respond effectively. The overview Notes explain what to watch for, what response might be helpful and, for members who try to inhibit the protagonist's purpose, what possible retribution to guard against.
About the Author: Charles G. Beaudette was born and raised in the Boston area. He graduated from MIT in 1952 and then served two years in the USAF. Afterwards he did graduate studies at MIT, and practiced engineering with companies thereabout. In 1958 he founded Dychro Corporation, and after a few years of growth sold it to a computer development company. He worked for EG&G Corp. as a senior engineer and engineering manager from 1962 to 1972, where he participated in development of one of the first digital facsimile machines with its associated telephone-line 6400 bps modem. His specialities were system design, image scanning and compression, and digital encoding for transmission.In 1973 he moved to Maine where he offered consulting services to local, national, and international firms for twelve years, retiring in 1985. From 1989 he followed the Cold-Fusion episode which emerged that year from the University of Utah. From 1995 to 2002 he wrote two editions of Excess Heat, Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed, a report on the revolutionary experimental science at the core of the subject, and the extensive theoretical controversy surrounding it. His papers from that undertaking now reside as a special collection at the J. Willard Marriott Library of the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah. He has watched committees, boards, and their members, trustees, directors for fifty years. He offers here a distillation of the dark side of leadership. Mr. Beaudette has three children and lives with his wife in the village of South Bristol, Maine.