Adney Y. Komatsu

Adney Y. Komatsu appears in Kyle’s corpus through Gordon B. Hinckley — Go Forward With Faith, where his recollection anchors the book’s “lead by encouragement, not criticism” theme. As a mission president, Komatsu described three years of working under Gordon B. Hinckley without once being criticized “despite all my weaknesses.” His account, quoted at length in the book: each time Hinckley visited, “I thought, ‘I’m going to get it right between the eyes this time… But every time he came off the plane he would grab my hand like he was pumping water out of a well with great enthusiasm: “Well, President Komatsu, how are you getting along?… You’re doing great work.”’” The punchline Kyle’s note pulls out — “he didn’t come into my area and tell me all about the weaknesses that I already knew about” — is set against the “spirit of criticism” and the maxim that “it is so much nobler to speak constructively.”

In Kyle’s reading the Komatsu story is one of the book’s load-bearing leadership lessons, illustrating that a leader gets more from people by raising them up (“I felt I should give 105 percent, not just 100 percent”) than by cataloguing their faults.

Context: Adney Yoshio Komatsu (1923–2011) was a Hawaii-born leader in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the first General Authority of Japanese ancestry, serving as an Assistant to the Quorum of the Twelve and later in the First Quorum of the Seventy.

Where this appears

• Gordon B. Hinckley — Go Forward With Faith — his mission-president recollection supplies the central anecdote for the book’s “encouragement over criticism” leadership theme.