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Great leaders are few and far between but Nancy Koehn, a historian of business at Harvard Business School, has put together a compendium of anecdotes from five great leaders throughout history. It reads like a whos-who of humanitarianism, with true stories of grit and determination from the likes of explorer Ernest Shackleton, American president Abraham Lincoln, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the Nazi-resisting Lutheran minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the environmental activist Rachel Carson. Here, Nancy Koehn talks to us about how Ernest Shackleton overcame some incredible odds to hold his team together on a doomed Antarctic expedition, and how we can learn from his stories. Nancy's great new book is Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times.

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NANCY KOEHN:

Nancy Koehn is a historian at the Harvard Business School where she holds the James E. Robison chair of Business Administration. Koehn's research focuses on how leaders, past and present, craft lives of purpose, worth, and impact.

Her new book, Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times is an enthralling historical narrative filled with critical leadership insights that will be of interest to a wide range of readers—including those in government, business, education, and the arts—Forged in Crisis spotlights five masters of crisis: polar explorer Ernest Shackleton; President Abraham Lincoln; legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass; Nazi-resisting clergyman Dietrich Bonhoeffer; and environmental crusader Rachel Carson.

Koehn is the author of numerous books, articles, and Harvard Business School cases. She writes frequently for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Harvard Business Review Online. She is also a weekly commentator on National Public Radio and has appeared on many national television programs. She has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and in many other venues.

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University, Koehn earned a Master of Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government before taking her MA and PhD in History from Harvard. She lives outside Boston and is a dedicated equestrian.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Nancy Koehn: My new book—ten years in the making—is called Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times.

And it spotlights five astounding—now really legendary—leaders who found themselves each in the midst of a great crisis, and how in the midst of that crisis they made themselves capable of doing impossible things.

So it’s really a book about how ordinary people can make themselves capable of doing extraordinary things.

Each of the five people in this book—the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, American president Abraham Lincoln, the escaped slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the Nazi-resisting Lutheran minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the environmental activist and crusader Rachel Carson—discover that resilience is absolutely critical to accomplishing their mission.

And we like to think, or many of us like to think—I certainly thought this before I really got to know these people—that resilience was something I was born with. I had a healthy slug of it. I would access it and use it. And then that would serve me well when I needed it, even though I couldn’t be exactly sure when that would be.

But I don’t think that’s the case. These stories teach us that each of these people worked on their own resilience. They discover some in themselves.

Shackleton finds his ship trapped in the ice, right. It’s drifting hopelessly like a board stuck in a vice along the currents off the coast of Antarctica in early 1915. He’s powerless to do anything about it; after lots and lots of trying he can’t pry the ship loose. And so somehow he’s got to find in himself —and I mean we can read about his efforts to do this in the diary—The reserves he needs.

He says, “I pray to God I can shape my mark to a new mark now that the old goal, now that the old mark has run aground.” His old goal of crossing the Antarctic is now over.

So he’s got to shape himself to the mark of saving his men, and he’s like pray to God I can do that in myself.

And so he starts off with, “I’m going to try and do this. I’ve got to have that covenant with myself to get better and stronge...

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