Who were history's great leaders?

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"Real power for leaders lies in giving away the unimportant stuff." So says author and leadership researcher Nancy Koehn, who in looking at history's most accomplished individuals, has found that perfection and success don't necessarily go hand in hand. Leaders must focus their energies on just a few core goals, says Koehn. To make her point, she takes lessons from the lives of President Abraham Lincoln, environmentalist Rachel Carson, abolitionist Frederick Douglas, pastor and would-be Hitler assassin Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and explorer Ernest Shackleton. Nancy Koehn is the author of 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: One of the really interesting corollaries that’s part of many of these stories, the corollaries of focus—and these are the stories of Ernest Shackleton the explorer, the U.S. president Abraham Lincoln, the famous African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, a very important resistor to Hitler in Nazi Germany Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the environmental activist Rachel Carson—is that each of them discover that focus is not only a way of bringing out their best possibilities, their greatest power as leaders, it’s also a way of conceding what isn’t important and giving away all of that stuff.

So let me give you a really interesting example.

In the early 1850s, Lincoln gives a law lecture to a bunch of aspiring lawyers. And he says, 'Look, I learned the hard way that if I could swing a jury to my side on the one or two or three critical issues that really matter to the case, I could simply give away everything else to my opponent. I could give away this point, then I could give away this point, then I could give away this point, and then I could give away this point, because I only needed to hold on to those one, two, or three issues. And by doing so I could (1) disarm the opposition, (2) keep the jury very focused on where they needed to be focused, and (3) claim all that I needed and nothing more for a judicial victory.”

And I think that is just a great lesson writ large for our moment.

We have so many leaders right now, and so many of us want at some emotional level to have all the victories, to get all the goodies, to be perfect on every front.

And each of these people learn that real power for leaders lies in giving away the unimportant stuff, in recognizing what’s a small or unimportant victory and joyfully handing it to someone else—including one’s opponent.

And that in the doing of that, not only does one hold on to what really matters, one masters oneself enough not to need to have victory on every single front all the time.

And there is great power and great self-knowledge in the doing of that that create on the outside a kind of confidence that people are very much attracted to and motivated by.

One of the things that each of these people learn—and I think is particularly relevant today—i...

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