SURVIVAL GUIDE: Leading by listening first - Before you judge history or your staff, review the facts and the process.(management of information technology)(Column)

REVISIONISM IS the art of waiting until everyone who knows better is dead, then interpreting events through your ideological filter.

Consider the following response response to my recent column (see "Crisis management"). "Though [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] often erroneously gets credit for 'putting people back to work,' his successful efforts to expand the federal government past its constitutional boundaries is his real legacy. He should be acknowledged as a father of illegitimate government and the resulting federal fiscal bloat." It's bad revisionism because not everyone who knows better is dead yet.

What bothers me isn't that my respondent challenged my …