Bob Korstad, Alma Blount, Tony Brown and Bruce Payne tell stories about how their life experiences have informed their understanding of what leadership is and how to teach it, and why mentoring is central to their approaches.

We’re all facing a lot of challenges where we might see something that’s wrong and need to find our voice to be able to stand up, and that base of moral courage has given us the ability to do that.

It’s a journey that we’re all on, but just at different stages.

Leadership is acting in accordance with your values. And you can’t decide your values on the fly.

The work I do now is really rooted in the idea the everybody has a story.

How do you find things that we can agree on… and how we get united around that, rather than getting sidetracked on things that would otherwise divide us?

I think one of the most important values and lessons that I acquired…is listening.

It’s not about your making a judgment about who was a good or a bad person. It’s merely about forcing yourself to at least engage and see if from their perspective.

You often get as much or learn as much out of the doing and the trying and the process. And even if you’re not the first one to cross the finish line, you’ve learned how to run a race.

I found comfort just in knowing that others had been through it and had found their way.

This is the kind of crazy thing that when you ask why not, every once in a while, the world will say, “Yeah, why not? Let’s make that happen differently.”

The values…were service, altruism…The imperative: that those who were blessed with lots of talent exercise those talents in ways that helped improve the lot of those less well off in society.

If you can give people the strength to say, “This is what I’m going to do, and this is why I’m going to do it,” they may have to pay a price for doing it, but they’ll never regret that.