To Our Readers

By ELIZABETH VALK LONG President

NOW THAT THIS WEEK'S ISSUE ON leadership is in your hands, special-projects editor Barrett Seaman can get a good night's sleep. Ever since he started work on the package last summer, Seaman says, he has been waking up regularly at 4 a.m. "I worried about whether we had chosen the right people," he recalls. "I worried about how much we would miss the people we had to leave out."

Hundreds of nominations poured in from TIME's domestic bureaus. The first cut produced 137 names. The second, and most excruciating, yielded 50. "It was like selecting the person who is Most Likely to Succeed for the school yearbook," says assistant editor Elizabeth Rudulph, who coordinated research for the project. "You don't want to pick someone who will peak early and then fade." By the same token, says Faith Corman, a free-lance journalist who also worked on the issue, "an overachiever is not the same thing as a leader."

One of the most vigorous debates centered on the age cutoff, which was finally set at 40. Some staff members argued that the limit should be even higher, at age 50. People are living longer, they pointed out, and women who have children often don't come into their own until after their offspring become self-sufficient. "Finally, we decided to err on the side of youth," Seaman says. "To some extent, it was an arbitrary choice. But we wanted people who would be making a difference well into the next century."

That decision came to haunt senior correspondent Richard N. Ostling, whose job it was to find young leaders from the religious and intellectual arenas. "Thought and faith require a long period of marination to produce excellence," Ostling notes. "It's devilishly hard to find people of worth who are 40 or younger in those fields."

What many of TIME's young leaders have in common is an ability to take their message to people of differing backgrounds and perspectives. "In this increasingly fragmented society, we found that people tend to lead from out of their groups," Seaman continues. "The leaders we chose seem to have the potential to reach out beyond those groups, to bridge the gaps that exist in our world." Are TIME's selections prophetic? "The thing of it is," said Seaman, "I won't know whether or not we have hit the mark for at least another 15 years." Given the quality of the choices, however, it should prove gratifying to see how far they go.