I became the Leadership Editor of Forbes in December 2008, just as the American business world was crashing down and taking the jobs and homes of millions with it. Had I started the job a year or two earlier, I might have found that covering things like how to be a manager, corporate strategy, risk management, governance, and corporate social responsibility was worthy but possibly sometimes a little dull. Now I found that my beat was everything that had gone terribly wrong and was going to have to go very right to get us all back to prosperity. Since then, I've had the pleasure of publishing some of the world's best minds on every aspect of leadership. Previously I was a senior editor of Forbes magazine, and before that I was for many years the managing editor of American Heritage and the editor of the quarterly Invention & Technology. I've emceed the annual induction ceremony at the National Inventors Hall of Fame, done the play-by-play over the P.A. system on a cruise ship as it passed through the Panama Canal, and written on the history of bourbon whiskey and the making of Steinway pianos, among many, many other things. I prepared for all that by majoring in music in college and writing a senior thesis on the music of Hector Berlioz.