This blog post by Scott Adams is insightful. People who are not leaders don't understand those who are. There are very few leaders in academia, for example. Most of the committees on which I sit are utterly unproductive and therefore useless. People with doctoral degrees sit around talking about unimportant matters that could be dealt with by one decisive person. The discussions go on aimlessly. I'm not picking on academics, merely pointing out that not everyone is capable of leading.
People who aren't leaders don't understand Donald Trump. They think his success in the business world is based on luck. It never occurs to them that he has leadership qualities that they lack. One important leadership quality, as Adams notes, is the ability to sift quickly through reams of information. One of the things I learned early on as a law clerk is that my memoranda to the attorneys were supposed to provide just the information that they needed in order to decide whether to take a case (or how to proceed in a case they had already taken).
"Get to the point," is the mantra of business, law, and medicine, all of which have important work to do. In academia, by contrast, you can be long-winded. Have you ever read a law-review article? Is it any wonder that judges don't read law-review articles anymore? They're windy, self-indulgent, jargon-laden, and politically correct. No judge has time for that.
