Free Leadership and Crisis by Bobby Jindal

thousands of people. It was intense but rewarding work, as we built teams with corporate employees and helped them solve problems.
    McKinsey encouraged us to tell clients that if we were not adding tangible value to the company they should fire us. We were not hired to be yes-men and women. I remember one time we were working directly with a big client, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Our team worked like crazy, including weekends, holidays, and even vacations. In return our director took us out sailing and kept us well-fed, even though my team perceived that the client wasn’t taking our advice. I wasn’t the most senior person on the team, but during a meeting with the client, I told him directly that I didn’t think we were adding value, because the company was ignoring our advice.
    My director on this project later called us into his office. I told him what had happened. My teammates, however, didn’t back me up. I was sure I was done with McKinsey. But then I got a voicemail from the director. He said he was proud of me; I had done exactly the right thing. That’s what you were supposed to do—speak up.
    I was only at McKinsey for about eighteen months, but a lot of things I believed to be true about the corporate world were reinforced
during my time there. I learned the difference between working hard and working smart, that what matters is results; I learned the importance of hiring rising stars, even if you might not keep them long; I learned that “personnel is policy”; and I learned to avoid micromanagement. I was also beginning to realize that I was going to have to make an important decision in my life: did I want to help hundreds of people directly and personally by being a doctor, or thousands of people indirectly through public service?

CHAPTER 4
    TO EDUCATE A CHILD
    I never made it to med school, but I’ve had plenty of opportunities to diagnose problems. At age twenty-seven, I was asked to head the University of Louisiana system, which oversees eight universities. It is the sixteenth largest system of higher education in the country.
    Education has always been important to me because I had the powerful example of my father. He grew up in a home with no electricity or running water, and his parents had little formal education and spoke no English. So when at age six it was time for my dad to go to school, it was all up to his own initiative. There was no parent-teacher meeting or school bus to pick him up. His parents didn’t deter him, but they didn’t encourage him either.
    You often hear stories about how someone’s mom or dad had to walk six miles to school, uphill both ways. Well, in my father’s case that was largely true. He did walk six miles a day roundtrip from his house to a small village school in northern India, and he often had to do his homework by lamplight. He was the only one of nine kids to get past the fifth grade.

    The Indian education system was brutal. Every step of the way they would weed out average or below-average students, because there were a lot more students than available slots. And yet this young boy in Khanpur, carrying books from his house to a small village school, would go on to earn a degree in civil engineering.
    So you can imagine that when I was growing up, there was no tolerance for complaining about school, teachers, or homework—and this is still my attitude toward education today. Parents and kids who complain about too much homework, rigorous standards, and testing for results need to realize that high expectations, while sometimes challenging, are important. We need to set meaningful expectations for the students, parents, and even the adults in the school system.
    My parents made a lot of sacrifices to ensure I got a good education. By the time I was four, they were taking a portion of their modest salaries and paying tuition for me to attend Runnels, a small private school in Baton Rouge. (At that time public schools were generally not offering