The story behind the Story
By Jack Keogh, Managing Director, Keogh & Associates Consulting, LLC
Last year, I wrote a book called “Driving Straight on Crooked Lines: How an Irishman found his heart and nearly lost his mind” It’s autobiographical about my experience in one of the most powerful orders in Roman Catholicism, an organization where I worked for 20 years. This article is based on the events described in the book.
One of the challenges of being a priest in the Catholic Church is that the Chairman of the Board, the Pope, is infallible. My first CEO (Superior General), a Mexican priest named Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legion of Christ, did not claim to be infallible but acted as if he could never make a mistake. I obeyed him for some twenty years. After I left the Legion and discovered how many executives in the corporate world think and act as if they are infallible I realized how blessed I was to have had only two infallible bosses!
