It seems amazing to me how much of what he embodied for me is still part of who I am today. With the exception of my relationship to [former Cabinet Member] Elliot Richardson there’s no one with whom my encounters have stayed with me longer. I don’t think I realized it at the time actually, but looking back it’s so clear to me and so palpable. To me leadership is about asking difficult questions, raising issues that people don’t want to have raised. People conflate leadership and authority.

Gaudino embodied the exercise of leadership in his relationship to the community. He was always asking the difficult questions. He was always pointing out the gaps between people’s espoused values with behavior. He was always willing to put himself at risk by provoking the community for purposes that he thought were important. That’s what leadership is about. What we call leadership these days is people who exercise their authority really, really well, and we call it leadership because we don’t want people to exercise leadership.

The other thing that he taught me about teaching is that he was willing to start wherever you were. He didn’t insist you come to where he was. Basically he says, “You tell me where you are, we’ll start there, we’ll work from there. I want to know where you are right now.” And then he’d work with that, wherever it was. The best mentors, the best managers, the best teachers, I think, are people who beat the s— out of you but the beating comes from place of affection and love and commitment, so that you actually look forward to it, you know?

Marty Linsky '61, divides his time between New York and Boston, where he once served as Assistant Minority Leader of the Massachusetts House of Representatives and Chief Secretary/Counselor to Gov. William Weld and now writes and lectures on leadership at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and elsewhere around the country