I am glad to see this excerpt here. Awhile back I used the book The Character-Based Leader as a backdrop for an article and wanted to include this chapter as one of the summaries. So much of the book was good, it was a difficult decision of what to include.

It makes my heart hurt to realize that we are in a universal crisis of character on many levels. While character is not hereditary, it is learned behavior, it is cultural, it is familial, and its tentacles of influence are encompassing.