PJ Crowley: How Obama learned the limits of American power

It's been a long and complicated eight years for America's foreign policy under Barack Obama, but the chastened president is still a believer in US leadership, as PJ Crowley writes.

In the first year of his presidency, Barack Obama the idealistic internationalist cared deeply about what the world thought of US policy and power and committed himself to repairing America's standing in the world.....

In the last year of his presidency, a far more chastened and realistic Barack Obama gave a remarkably blunt series of interviews to Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic that revealed the difficulty of translating that presumed indispensability into coherent strategies and meaningful collective action to resolve complex conflicts that are rooted as much in the past as the present.(Read the rest of the article here)

What struck me as I read this article on the BBC website, was not so much about how Obama 'learned the limits of American power', but how real those words in italics (italics my own) could easily have referred to how an organization works.

Newly appointed or promoted executives might have had lofty and idealistic hopes of transforming the organizations or departments they took over into one where people really worked in teams.  Some do succeed very well, some may encounter  the difficulty of translating (an idea)  into coherent strategies and meaningful collective action to resolve complex conflicts that are rooted as much in the past as the present.

I heard of executives who hired personal life coaches, or had personal life coaches hired for them by their organizations who worked wonders.  But I do wonder for some of the personal life coaches who have had limited corporate experience and hence perhaps less personal experience of the dynamics of the corporate world, how are they able to advise and coach their charges?