Book Recommendation: Leadership in Turbulent Times

How the hell did they do it?

Guys like Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, I mean. These poor guys did not have the opportunities to learn about leadership that we have today—no business schools to learn all the latest research about leadership, no Amazon to ship them the latest leadership tome, and certainly no blogs dispensing daily wisdom. It boggles the mind that they could even function as leaders without the resources we have today.

Yet somehow they managed to do OK. In fact, when you compare them to the political pygmies who populate Washington today, you might say they did better than OK. If you would like to learn how, I strongly recommend Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book: Leadership in Turbulent Times.

Goodwin examines the lives of four American presidents: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. The first three were unquestionably great presidents, and the fourth at least achieved great things for civil rights in America.

She divides the book into three sections, and they read like the acts in a play.

The first section is called “Ambition and the Recognition of Leadership”, and it takes us through the early years up through their twenties, each in a separate chapter, covering their motivations and aspirations, as well as the soil conditions where their budding leadership skills took root. What’s obvious is that leaders—at least the great ones—are both born and made. None of the four had “natural” leadership competencies; they all made mistakes and they all developed their skills through thousands of hours of study, speaking, and interactions with thousands of people. But the only reason they put in those hours, was that each was gifted with extraordinary ambition and drive, and that’s something no one can teach you. If your father told you education was a “doubly wasted” because it cost money and kept you from work, and pulled you out of school at age nine, would you walk for miles after work to borrow books and then read them at night by the light of a fire, as Lincoln did?

The second section, “Adversity and Growth”, is about the introduction of conflict and crisis, of heartache and challenge that could have easily crushed the spirit of each. One wonders if any of the four would have been the leaders they became if they had not each undergone their personal ordeals. How would Theodore Roosevelt’s personal approach to life have developed if he had not suffered the unfathomable tragedy of his mother and his young wife both dying on the same day, and had not gone west to live and work on his Dakota ranch? Would FDR, born to a life of luxury, have had the compassion for the less fortunate if he had not been paralyzed by polio? Maybe, maybe not—there’s no way to prove it one way or the other. But what is useful and even inspirational to know is that, if you go through a personal crisis of your own, you might be able to take heart and know that it’s just possible that you can come through on the other side as a better person for it.

The third section, “The Leader and the Times: How They Led”, recognizes that there is no single flavor of leadership that applies in every circumstance. Goodwin examines four types, transformational leadership, crisis management, turnaround leadership, and visionary leadership, using a case study for each. Some of the “lessons” feel a bit bolted-on, as if an MBA graduate student helped her translate historical lessons to appeal to a wider business audience, but that’s a minor quibble. (In fact, I probably wouldn’t have written this post if it didn’t have an appeal to a wider business audience.)

But I don’t recommend you read the book for its specific “lessons”. Yes, they’re useful in a bullet point sort of way, kind of like lists of things that great leaders should do. But the problem with lists is that they generally dispense generic advice that everybody already knows anyway. Read it instead to soak up the ethos of leadership: the character development that prepares a person to rise to the unprecedented challenges ahead of them.

When times are turbulent and your organization or team most needs a steady hand, it’s not going to be the formulas that you learned in business school that will get you through. It’s the strength that is forged in the crucible of personal crisis, the compassion developed by thousands of individual personal encounters with real people, and the clarity of purpose that comes from long hours of introspection and careful thought about who you are as a person and as a leader. And one of the best ways to think productively about leadership is to read this book.

I began by asking how people learned about leadership in days gone by. They studied the leaders who had gone before them. Lincoln revered and studied Washington, and was in turn revered by Theodore. Franklin consciously modeled his own career on that of his cousin, and in turn mentored LBJ. You don’t have to stop reading all that other stuff that we have today, but there is a lot to be gained by studying great historical figures, and Leadership in Turbulent Times is a n excellent place to start.