“Are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect growth of leadership? Do the times make the leader or does the leader shape the times?...What is the difference between power, title, and leadership?”
I’m Mark Martin with "Martin’s Must Reads." These are some of the questions that Doris Kearns Goodwin explores in her book Leadership in Turbulent Times.
Ms. Kearns uses the lives of four United States presidents: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson to address the above questions. The four men come from vastly different backgrounds: the two Roosevelts from extreme wealth and privilege, Lincoln and Johnson from poverty. All four men had tremendous personal and professional setbacks that would eventually shape how they would lead.
She spends time examining their years in the White House as she looks at one riddle of leadership -- “Do leaders shape the times or do the times summon their leaders?” What the four did have in common was fierce ambition, an inordinate drive to succeed, perseverance, hard work ethics and the willingness to make themselves better leaders.
Ms. Kearns summarizes her thoughts on leadership with a reference to Lincoln, “He grew, and continued to grow, into a leader who became so powerfully fused with the problems tearing his country apart that his desire to lead and his need to serve coalesced into a single indomitable force…Such leadership offers us humanity, purpose, and wisdom, not in turbulent times alone, but also in our everyday lives.”
In today’s stormy times when good leadership is needed more than ever, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Leadership in Turbulent Times is a valuable study in the lives of four men who held the highest elected office in our country.
