Leadership in Turbulent Times – by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Date read: 4/25/20. Recommendation: 10/10.
This was one of the best books, if not the best, that I’ve read in the past twelve months. Goodwin highlights lessons in leadership demonstrated by four US Presidents: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. Goodwin explores how each president came from a very different upbringing and the role that played in their leadership style. She also looks at how each man responded to extreme hardship during the bleakest moments of their lives—three of the four emerged from catastrophic turns of fortune with an enlarged capacity for leadership. Each president demonstrated their own unique capacity for transformational, crisis, turnaround, and visionary leadership. Goodwin structures the book in an accessible way that proves to be a great jumping-off point to explore both the lives and the leadership principles that helped guide a few of our best presidents.
See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.
My Notes:
Formative Years:
“Privilege can stunt ambition, just as the lack of privilege can fire ambition.” DKG
“Temperament is the great separator.” Richard Neustadt
Lincoln:
Incredible motivation and willpower to develop every talent to the fullest.
Lincoln’s hallmark: the philosophical and poetic depths of his mind.
Honed a clear and inquisitive mind through hard work. He would rewrite passages that stuck him and keep them in a scrapbook. “I am slow to learn and slow to forget what I have learned.” Lincoln
“While his mind was neither quick nor facile, young Lincoln possessed singular powers of reasoning and comprehension, unflagging curiosity, and a fierce, almost irresistible, compulsion to understand the meaning of what he heard, read, or was taught.” DKG
Formal education ended at the age of nine, after that he had to educate himself. He was voracious reader, scoured the countryside to borrow books and read every volume.
Of the four presidents in this book, “Only Abraham Lincoln, who had actually endured physical danger and the bitter hardships of wilderness life, never romanticized his family’s past.” DKG
Teddy Roosevelt:
“His ability to concentrate was such that the house might fall about his head and we would not be diverted.”
Teddy’s hallmark: his scintillating breadth of intelligence.
Franklin Roosevelt:
Optimistic spirit and expectation that things would turn out for the best were a testament to the self-confidence he developed during the peacefulness and regularity of his childhood days.
FDR’s hallmark: “An uncommon intuitive capacity and interpersonal intelligence allowed him as a child to read the intentions and desires of his parents, to react appropriately to shifting household moods—gifts that he would nurture and develop in the years ahead. While he did not learn as a felling academic often does—by mastering vast reading material and applying analytical skills—he possessed an incredibly shrewd, complicated, problem-solving intelligence.” DKG
His ability in later years to adapt to changing circumstances also proved vital to his leadership success. Adaptability was forced upon him at the age of eight when his father suffered a heart attack. “The need to navigate the altered dynamic of Springwood required new measures of secrecy, duplicity, and manipulation—qualities that would later prove troubling but were at this juncture benign, designed only to protect a loved one from harm.”
After his father’s heart attack, FDR spent more time in the house (rather than sledding, horseback riding, fishing, which he and his father did daily in his early years). Here he began to build collections of stamps, maps, model ships, etc.
Collecting is a way of ordering a disordered world. It holds a special meaning for children, offering a small corner of the world where the child is in charge, experiencing the “thrill of acquisition.” (Summarizing Walter Benjamin)
Test and learn: “He would fling things agains the wall, seeing if they would stick; if they didn’t, he would acknowledge his mistake and try something else.” DKG
Hobbies and Meditative Space:
Lincoln was able to relax with poetry and theater.
Teddy was interested in birds, exploration, and the latest novels.
FDR spent hours away sailing, playing with stamps, enjoying poker and social chatter.
LBJ, in contrast, could never unwind and let go for a few hours.
“Roosevelt’s childhood hobbies (mainly sorting and arranging his stamp collection) would serve in later years as invaluable tools in nourishing his leadership—providing a meditative state, a space which he could turn things over in his mind, the means by which he could relax and replenish his energy.” DKG
Adversity and Growth:
Growth in the face of frustration and extracting wisdom from experience: “Some people lose their bearings; their lives are forever stunted. Others resume their normal behaviors after a period of time. Still others, through reflection and adaptive capacity, are able to transcend their ordeal, armed with a greater resolve and purpose.” DKG
“Each of these three men (Lincoln, Teddy, FDR) emerged from a catastrophic turn of fortune with an enlarged capacity for leadership.” DKG
Lincoln:
Alive time vs. dead time (see Robert Greene): The half-decade after Lincoln’s unhappy tenure in Congress was anything but a passive time. “It was, on the contrary, and intense period of personal, intellectual, moral and professional growth, for during these years he learned to position himself as a lawyer and leader able to cope with the tremors that were beginning to rack the country.”
“What fired in Lincoln in this furious and fertile time of self-improvement? The answer lay in his readiness to gaze in the mirror and soberly scrutinize himself.” DKG
“Leave nothing for tomorrow that can be done today.” Lincoln
One of the key’s to Lincoln’s success was his ability to break complex problems into their simplest elements.
Teddy Roosevelt:
After his wife and mother died just hours apart in 1884, Teddy set off for the North Dakota where he would remain for two years, working on a cattle ranch and learning how heal, grow, and move past the trauma. He’d later regard this as “the most important educational asset” of his entire life. He built grit and cultivated his new identity as “a hybrid of the cultivated easterner and the hard-bitten westerner.”
Franklin Roosevelt:
Trial and error was fundamental to his leadership style. “In the Navy Department, he had flung ideas against the wall to see which ones might stick; during the New Deal he would experiment with one program after another, swiftly changing course if the present one proved ineffective.” DKG
Lessons in Leadership:
Lincoln:
Team of rivals: Unlike James Buchanan who had chosen a cabinet of like-minded men who wouldn’t question his authority, Lincoln actively sought the opposite. “Lincoln created a team of independent, strong-minded men, all of whom were more experienced in public life, better educated, and more celebrated than he. In the top three positions, at the State Department, the Treasury, and the Justice Department, he placed his three chief rivals—William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates—each of whom thought he should be president instead of the prairie lawyer from Illinois.” Lincoln did this because he knew the country was in peril and these were the strongest men he knew.
“Lincoln possessed a deep-rooted integrity and humility combined with an ever-growing confidence in his capacity to lead. Most of all, he brought a mind tempered by failure, a mind able to fashion the appalling suffering ahead into a narrative that would give direction, purpose, and lasting inspiration.” DKG
Control anger: When angry at a colleague, Lincoln would write out a letter with all his frustrations and gripes, then put the letter aside until he calmed down and could review what he had written. The act of talking through his frustrations with himself was always enough and he never sent the vast majority of these.
Other key transformational leadership lessons from Lincoln:
Gather firsthand information, ask questions.
Find time and space in which to think.
Assume full responsibility for a pivotal decision.
Understand the emotional needs of each member of the team.
Refuse to let past resentments fester; transcend personal vendettas.
Shield colleagues from blame and don’t allow subordinates to take the blame.
Lincoln was a master of combining transactional and transformational leadership. He knew how to combine an appeal to self-interest to influence behavior of others while layering on an inspiring vision so people could also identify with something larger than themselves.
Franklin Roosevelt:
Make yourself appear confident in order to become more confident: “The remarkable thing about him (FDR) was his readiness to assume responsibility and his taking that responsibility with a smile.” FDR
Fireside chats: Communicated challenges facing the country by translating stories in a way that could be better understood by himself and the average citizen, rather than in highly specialized language of the legal and banking worlds. Used simple, direct communication and identified the questions people asked themselves so he could answer them.
“Roosevelt’s gift of communication prove the vital instrument of his success in developing a common mission, clarifying problems, mobilizing action, and earning people’s trust.” DKG
Be open to experiment: “Roosevelt stressed the improvisational, experimental nature of the New Deal.” He was adaptable, willing to shift ground, revise, and accommodate changing circumstances, due to the entirely new problems the country faced.
Bias for action: “Do the very best you can in making up your mind, but once your mind is made up go ahead.” FDR
In victory know when to stop:
Theodore Roosevelt announced he would not run for a third term and instead backed William Howard Taft and set sail for a year-long safari. But when he returned he decided he wanted to challenge Taft for the nomination after all and lost. Later Roosevelt decided to run as a third party candidate and allowed Woodrow Wilson to win the election, hurting the progressive cause he stood for.