The Most Important Letter Abraham Lincoln Never Sent | Nancy Koehn | Big Think

The Most Important Letter Abraham Lincoln Never Sent

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Want to be one of the greatest leaders of all time, with a wealth of success, power and respect? Try doing nothing for a change, says Harvard historian Nancy Koehn. This counterintuitive advice applies to moments of crisis, when the stakes are high and emotions are tense, because that is the very time when you're apt to make errors in your decision-making. Anger brings weakness, but you can conquer the trap of emotion by removing yourself from the situation, and sitting in silence to think. To prove that doing nothing in times of severe anger is a leadership skill worth developing, Koehn tells the story of the most important letter Abraham Lincoln never sent—if he had had email or twitter (i.e. quick reactions) back in 1863, the outcome of the Civil War and U.S. history may have been drastically different. It turns out you can win almost any fight if you learn how to respond thoughtfully in time, instead of reacting rashly in an instant. 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 most interesting and powerful lessons that I discovered in writing this book was that each of these five people — that’s Ernest Shackleton the Antarctic explorer; our sixteenth president Abraham Lincoln; the abolitionist and civil liberties crusader Frederick Douglass; the resistor to Nazi Germany’s evils Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor; and the environmental activist Rachel Carson, discover that sometimes doing nothing is the most powerful, the most significant, the most influential thing a leader can do.

And they discover that mostly by making mistakes, by acting quickly, decisively, rashly in a high stakes moment when they are highly charged, when they are emotionally very hot in terms of their temperature, and when people around them are emotionally very hot in terms of their emotional temperatures. They discover the power of waiting, of doing nothing when the stakes are high and emotional temperatures are high. And they discover this lesson because they make the mistake of acting, of writing, of speaking out, of making a decision when they are very, very hot under the collar, right? When their hair on the back of their neck is really on end. And they realize, “This is not my best mode. This is not my strongest self. I can actually do a lot of damage to my mission, my followers, what I’m trying to accomplish if I make choices when I don’t see myself as clearly, when I’m not as temperate and careful and thoughtful and reflective and emotionally aware as I might be.”

And so one of the best examples of this is an example that occurred right after the Battle of Gettysburg. And I tell it in the conclusion to the book. Abraham Lincoln has just learned that the Union Army, commanded by a general named George Meade, has won a decisive battle in three days of bloody fighting in southern Pennsylvania in Gettysburg against Robert ...

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