Value is always the focus of the Shinsei Method™ of Training and Development. The Shinsei Method™ as a method of Leadership and Management training emphasizes the importance of understanding terms, defining terms, and using terms. Value is one of the most important terms for leadership, if not the most important. There are other terms that are important to be sure: competence, clarity, balance, trust, communication, reliability, knowledge, and optimism also figure prominently in any hierarchy of terms for leadership, management, business, and self-development. One of the most difficult challenges to leadership is the inadequate level of training that business schools and colleges typically provide for the task. Often that training is wholly ineffective and sometimes destructive. Leaders who seek practical knowledge and solutions–which is all that matters in business in terms of project productivity and efficiency–often find themselves having to re-learn what had been emphasized throughout school. However, this is precisely the type of question that an effective leader would do well to ask, but that he or she as a leader should have considerable practice in asking, so much practice in fact that this type of question is second nature or intuitive. The need for this type of independence is one of the reasons that the Shinsei Method™ also emphasizes the America’s founding documents as instructive guides for the type of mindset that effective leaders: rational, inquisitive, balanced, clearheaded. These values and principles permeate America’s founding documents particularly the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill or Rights. These values also permeate the American Federalist Papers. At the same time, these values tend to underrepresented in many school training programs, and the relevant experience in problem solving that these documents embody is completely disregarded throughout school severely handicapping future leaders right from the beginning. In addition, these valuable lessons imparted by these extraordinary documents and the American Revolutionary experience is often derided throughout schools that often engorge taxpayer and tuition money by the trillions while imparting very little value to students. This does two extremely deleterious things. First, it squanders the opportunities to inculcate important leadership policies, practices, and procedures such as self-development and competence. Second, it destroys individual aptitude for leadership by training future leaders that value is not important to create, obtain, protect, preserve, and defend. Of course the importance of value can never be eradicated. It is a natural principle. What does happen is many individuals start life with a wrongheaded approach to business that either must be re-learned or made up. The deficiency in individual competence established in many if not American schools–certainly the majority of mainstream schools–is a principle analogous to the cost-benefit relationship. Everything has cost-benefit trade off. Deficiency in leadership ability or basic competence has a high cost: more problems, more confusion, more risk, more trouble. The ability to think matters through and anticipate potential problems is a fundamental leadership quality. This ability also pervades the thrust and spirit of America’s founding documents–and the American heritage for that matter, much of which is lost in the educational training process. Many people ignore the costs of deficiency in competence, but the costs still accrue. To be effective, today’s leader must recognize cultural and educational trends and develop strategies to address them. This is one of the challenges of leadership because it means that individual leaders have to understand that there are certain trends going on, which are detrimental to organizational profitability. In order to pursue profitability as a basic organizational value across all levels of an organization, often requires a level of inner-strength, inner-balance, and especially self-trust that also tends to diminished and under-valued throughout school and in many other social venues. In other words, Today’s leader must often work against significant up-winds. However, work against them today’s leader must because leadership success has always required and will always require a certain baseline of business logic no matter the trends.