Read This 2: Leading Through a Sh*t Storm
“Reading is an honor and a gift from a warrior or historian who - a decade or a thousand decades ago - set aside time to write. He distilled a lifetime of campaigning in order to have a “conversation” with you.” - Jim Mattis, Call Sign Chaos
In hard times like these, consider it a blessing that times have been hard before. Leaders like yourself have weathered storms fare worse than this. It’s hard to believe while we’re in this whirling trifecta of a global pandemic, an economic downturn, and an oil crisis. But it’s true. And - the real blessing - they wrote about how they did it.
Lessons from the Past
“If we needed “new ideas” to help us construct our plan, old books were full of them.” - Jim Mattis, Call Sign Chaos
Queen Elizabeth I ascended to the throne in the midst of turmoil. A religious crisis threatened the monarch’s legitimacy, while a financial crisis threatened the monarch’s stability. The Queen responded by assembling a Privy Council. Unlike her predecessors, Elizabeth kept her council small (13 members compared to 50) and filled it with people who saw the issues of the day very differently. The group would debate and challenge each other. That discourse gave Elizabeth a deep understanding of the issues and helped her take England from a country on the verge of collapse to ruling nearly one quarter of the globe.
If you haven’t heard of the Privy Council, then maybe you have heard of the Team of Rivals, a group that played a similar role in Abraham Lincoln’s administration during the Civil War. That is one of many lessons of leadership you can expect to learn from the books in this edition of Read This.
Leading Through the Storm
If you haven't read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren't broad enough to sustain you. - Jim Mattis, Call Sign Chaos
In this edition of Read This, I’m giving you two book recommendations with a choose-your-own-adventure option for the third book.
The first book is Leadership: In Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Goodwin is a Presidential historian who has written books on four Presidents, all of whom lead the country through a major crisis. Leadership: In Turbulent Times gives you the major lessons in leadership from each of the Presidents she’s written about individually.
The second book is Forged in Crisis: The Making of Five Courageous Leaders by Nancy F. Koehn. Forged in Crisis focuses on a set of leaders from very different backgrounds, leading through very different crises. Koehn and Goodwin both take a close look at Abraham Lincoln. But then Koehn goes on to look at leaders from vastly different circumstances. Koehn explores the leadership of Ernest Shackleton, who rescued and saved every member of his crew when their ship is crushed by ice in Antarctica, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a priest who leads the underground resistance in Nazi Germany.
The examples studied by Koehn and Goodwin are very different but both sets of leaders triumph in very difficult circumstances. Most importantly, both authors arrive at the same conclusion: leaders - even those who succeed in the most challenging of circumstances - are made, not born.
Careful study of these leaders will give you a wealth of experience to draw from. So for your third book in this edition of Read This, pick one of the 8 leaders that Goodwin and Koehn describe and do a deep dive on their personal experience:
Abraham Lincoln: Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
Theodore Roosevelt: The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt: No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II
Lyndon B. Johnson: Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream
Ernest Shackleton: Endurance
Frederick Douglass: Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Rachel Carson: On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson
The first two books will give you a variety of lessons for leading during times like these. The third book will give you a deep understanding one leader’s experience.
Next week, we’ll approach the topic from a slightly different angle: what companies have survived, and even thrived, during extreme circumstances like the ones we find ourselves in now.
Until next week,
Zakk