Leaders everywhere have the same problem - who to look to as a role model. Hong Kong's Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa surely is among them, even this minute peering into the bathroom mirror, fingers on either side of his mouth, trying to emulate a Tony Blair grin or George W. Bush frown.
Or perhaps Mr Tung is looking to someone a bit more exotic, like Russia's President Vladimir Putin. Now, there is a leader to take a lesson or two from.
Mr Putin faces voters tomorrow in an election he is certain to win. With opinion polls showing he has 70 per cent support among the electorate, he has taken the economic step of reshuffling his cabinet before the election so he can get right down to business after recovering from the celebration party.
Mr Tung could do with large lashings of that sort of foresight - although whether he could recover from a vodka binge as rapidly is uncertain.
But there is more to Mr Putin than an ability to know precisely what the future holds. It is the way he runs Russia that makes you dip your hat, flip your wig or otherwise show appreciation to the good, the bad and the ugly.
Putting on his stern look on national television on Thursday, Mr Putin instructed Russians that if they did not vote, the country's democratic principles would be put in jeopardy. He did not say what would happen to those disobeying his order, but there are enough people who have opposed him in the past and are now in sticky situations to prove he is not kidding.
Jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky would tell you, if only he was allowed to make a public statement on the government-controlled media. Millionaire Boris Berezovsky, who headed the country's premier independent television network before being forced into exile, is not shy about speaking out from his luxury apartment in London, but he cannot get a word in edgeways either. Former presidential hopeful Ivan Rybkin, who dropped out of the race last week, was willing to until he mysteriously vanished for four days, a month ago, in what he claimed was a Putin-orchestrated kidnapping.
