Just eight months into his term, Barack Obama is facing a severe crisis that will define his leadership as president. The immediate challenge is health care reform, but the deeper issue is whether Obama the Leader or Obama the Politician will dominate.

Like the Roman god Janus, with two heads facing in opposite directions, Obama the Politician pulls against Obama the Leader. This identity crisis is eroding the President's political capital, hampering his chances for legislative success on health care, and alienating recession-stricken Americans.

We have always known there were two Obamas: one, the idealistic and compassionate community organizer whose service changed lives; the other, the skilled operative who emerged from the political wars of Chicago's south side. During the long, brutal presidential campaign, Obama did a brilliant job of integrating these two facets of his persona. Many who supported him hoped and trusted that once elected to the nation's highest office, Obama the Leader would retain his passionate commitment to certain ideals over and above political considerations. Since January, however, politics has seemed to dominate many of his decisions, with health care being the most recent example.

Rather than provide the leadership he promised on this crisis by presenting a comprehensive, integrated health care policy to the American people, Obama is instead playing politics by ceding leadership to Congress. In leaving the details of the reform bill to Congress, he has effectively abdicated, removing himself from substantive Capitol Hill discussions. Congress, in turn, has focused on only one aspect of this complex problem: health insurance reform that will provide guaranteed access. The other essential aspects of health care — cost, quality, and consumer focus on wellness and prevention — are being virtually ignored. All three must be addressed in an integrated fashion before the health care crisis can truly be resolved.

This will require real sacrifices and concessions from everyone, and a politicized executive cannot make that happen. What's needed here is realistic and, above all, forthright leadership. How can the President shed political pretense and become the same galvanizing leader on health care that he was during the 2008 campaign? How can Obama the Leader predominate over Obama the Politician and take full ownership of this process?

As leader of this all-important reform effort, he must immediately face the reality that the debate is going in the wrong direction, acknowledge the mistakes he made in abdicating and ceding leadership to Congress, and put the legislation on hold until early 2010. In my recent book, 7 Lessons for Leading in Crisis, this is Lesson #1: Face reality, starting with yourself.

Then he needs to go on offense. Obama should introduce an integrated plan that focuses first on wellness and prevention, develops detailed programs to incentivize quality outcomes and reduce costs, and offers affordable access. Most important, he must take his case to the American people and convince us that this plan is the only way to resolve the health care crisis for the long term.

During the campaign President Obama delivered a remarkable, uplifting speech on race in Philadelphia that elevated our level of national discourse. As president, he has demonstrated strong leadership in the Middle East peace process, and he has guided us away from financial collapse. Here is a man who is capable of authentic leadership.

Now, on health care, the United States needs Obama the Leader to step up again.

Bill George is professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and author of 7 Lessons for Leading in Crisis, True North, and Authentic Leadership. The former chair and CEO of Medtronic, he currently serves on the boards of ExxonMobil and Goldman Sachs and previously, Novartis and Target. Read more at www.BillGeorge.org, or follow him on Twitter @Bill_George.

According to the World Database of Happiness (yes, there is one), Iceland is the happiest place on earth. That's right, Iceland. Yes, I know it's cold and dark six months out of the year there. I'm just giving you the data.

The secret to their happiness? Eric Weiner, Author of The Geography of Bliss, traveled to Iceland to find out. After interviewing a number of Icelanders, Weiner discovered that their culture doesn't stigmatize failure. Icelanders aren't afraid to fail — or to be imperfect — and so they're more willing to pursue what they enjoy. That's one reason Iceland has more artists per capita than any other nation. "There's no one on the island telling them they're not good enough, so they just go ahead and sing and paint and write," Weiner writes.

Which makes them incredibly productive. They don't just sit around thinking they'd like to do something. They do it. According to the psychologist Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, who wrote the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, "It is not the skills we actually have that determine how we feel but the ones we think we have."

So if you think you're good at something, whether or not you are, you'll do it. The converse is also true: if you think you aren't good enough at something, you won't do it.

A friend of mine, Jeff, has wanted for some time to start a business teaching guitar*. But he hasn't yet. Why? When you sift through his various explanations and excuses it comes down to one simple problem.

He's a perfectionist.

Which means he'll never think he's good enough at guitar to teach it. And he'll never feel like he knows enough about running a business to start one.

Perfectionists have a hard time starting things and an even harder time finishing them. At the beginning, it's they who aren't ready. At the end, it's their product that's not. So either they don't start the screenplay or it sits in their drawer for ten years because they don't want to show it to anyone.

But the world doesn't reward perfection. It rewards productivity. And productivity can only be achieved through imperfection. Make a decision. Follow through. Learn from the outcome. Repeat over and over and over again. It's the scientific method of trial and error. Only by wading through the imperfect can we begin to achieve glimpses of the perfect.

So how do we escape perfectionism? I have three ideas:

1. Don't try to get it right in one big step. Just get it going.

Don't write a book, write a page. Don't create the entire presentation, just create a slide. Don't expect to be a great manager in your first six months, just try to set expectations well. Pick a small, manageable goal and follow through. Then pursue the next.

This gives you the opportunity to succeed more often, which will build your confidence. If each of your goals can be achieved in a day or less, that's a lot of opportunity to succeed.

My wife Eleanor is a fantastic mother to our three children. Sleep is extremely important to her and in her early days of parenting she read a tremendous number of parenting books, each one with different advice on how to predictably get children to sleep through the night. Each expert contradicted the next.
The only thing those books succeeded in doing was convince her she didn't know what she was doing. It was only after throwing all the books away that she was able to find herself as a parent. It's not that she found the answer. In fact, what helped is that she stopped looking for the answer.

What she found was her answer. And that allowed her to settle into her parenting. It made her calmer, more consistent, more confident. And that, of course, helped our children sleep better.

By all means, read, listen, and learn from others. But then put all the advice away, and shoot for what I consider to be the new gold standard: good enough.

Be the good-enough parent. The good-enough employee. The good-enough writer. That'll keep you going. Because ultimately, the key to perfection isn't getting it right. It's getting it often. If you do that, then, eventually, you'll get it right.

Critical feedback is helpful as long as it's offered with care and support. But the feedback that comes from jealousy or insecurity or arrogance or without any real knowledge of you? Ignore it.

And if you're a manager, your first duty is to do no harm. A friend of mine, Kendall Wright, once told me that a manager's job is to remove the obstacles that prevent people from making their maximum contribution. That's as good a definition as I've ever heard.

And yet sometimes, we are the obstacle. As managers, we're often the ones who stand in judgment of other people and their work. And when we're too hard on someone or watch too closely or correct too often or focus on the mistakes more than the successes, then we sap their confidence. And without confidence, no one can achieve much.

Catch someone doing seven things right before you point out one thing they're doing wrong. Keep up that 7:1 ratio and you'll keep your employees moving in the right direction.

These three ideas are a good start. Don't worry about following them perfectly though. Just well enough.

*I've changed a couple of details in this story to protect the individual's identity.

Children in the Northern Hemisphere are headed back to school this time of year. The great majority of them will go back to the traditional classroom, in which every student studies the same subjects in the same way at the same time. The fact that this approach doesn't work very well doesn't seem to hinder its popularity. We know that students are interested in different things, learn in different ways, and proceed at different paces. So why the "forced march" approach to education?

This time-honored but silly approach to education, however, is beginning to crack. This summer, for example, 80 students at Middle School 131 in New York's Chinatown attended the "School for One." They worked on individual computers, with content tailored to their progress and learning styles. At any given moment they might be working with a virtual (or live) tutor, filling out an online worksheet, or playing an educational video game. Their individualized learning programs or "playlists" are generated by a complex "learning algorithm" with analytical precision. They studied only math with this approach, but the same approach could be employed for other subjects.

There are other instances of this "differentiated learning." SAS offers a program called Curriculum Pathways that serves up modularized content to students in grades 8-12, and it's also got an analytical function to individualize the educational offerings. Best of all, SAS makes it available for free.

This approach is also being adopted for higher education. I spoke recently with William Durham, the head of online education at Lone Star Community College in Houston. Lone Star has 17,000 online students, and the number is growing rapidly. He said they are moving in the same direction with e-learning. "It will increasingly be individualized in terms of content, learning style, mastery levels, and several other dimensions," he said. "And analytics are the key to making it all work."

This analytical approach to selecting individualized modular content has the potential to help students learn better, keep them interested, and even to increase the productivity of educational institutions. It may also change the way educators work and collaborate, as the Teaching Matters blogsuggests.

But this change won't come quickly or cheaply. A computer for each student is only the beginning of the necessary infrastructure. A great deal of "edutainment" content will have to be developed. Providers of video-based educational content, including PBS Teachers and NBC iCue, will have to modularize it and categorize its attributes. Changes in teaching approaches, including frequent assessments, clear communication about learning objectives, and transmission of learning ownership to the learner, will have to take place, as Dr. Dylan Wiliam of the Educational Testing Service has pointed out. And all of this will have to be accompanied by substantial research to make sure it works. Fortunately, many of these changes are consistent with those espoused by the Obama administration, including Arne Duncan, the secretary of education. And they've got stimulus money to spend.

Someday soon, going back to school will be as exciting as the best online experience, and as targeted as the most sophisticated marketing offer. If you're in school now and not that pumped about going back, try to be patient — help is on the way.