Everyday People Who Led Momentous Change

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 19 October 2017

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Nancy Koehn, a Harvard Business School historian, tells the life stories of three influential leaders: the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the pacifist Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the ecologist Rachel Carson. They all overcame personal challenges to achieve and inspire social change. In Koehn’s new book, "Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times," she argues that tomorrow's leaders of social change will come from the business world.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Closer Podcast brings you the inside story of deals changing the world, told by the people who know how it all went down.
0:09.0	Understand the human motivations behind groundbreaking business decisions with host Amy Keene.
0:14.6	Listen to The Closer,cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish in for Sarah Green Carmichael.
0:37.0	CBS reports, The silent spring of Rachel Carson. The year was 1963.
0:45.0	Biologist and author Rachel Carson warned millions of US television viewers
0:50.0	about a new danger in the land, air, and water.
0:54.0	We've heard the benefits of pesticides.
0:58.0	We have heard a great deal about their safety,
1:02.0	but very little about... deal about the
1:05.0	the hazards, very little about the hazards, very little about the failures, the inefficiencies.
1:10.0	And yet the public was being asked to accept these chemicals, was being asked to acquiesce in their use, and did not have the whole picture.
1:21.0	So I said about to remedy the balance there.
1:25.0	Her remedy was to write Silent Spring, a carefully researched book on the widely used pesticide
1:30.6	DDT. The bestseller infuriated the chemical companies, spurred Congress to investigate
1:36.8	and inspired the environmental movement. Carson is just one of three social change agents we'll be talking about today.
1:44.4	While she wanted to protect the earth,
1:46.5	Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer aimed to topple the Nazi regime.
1:50.8	He died in a concentration camp. His writings continue to inspire others to live with
1:56.2	conviction and humility. And in the 19th century, former slave Frederick Douglass campaigned
2:01.8	to end slavery in the United States.
2:04.7	The journey of each of these social reformers holds lessons for business leaders, says our guest
2:10.2	on the show Harvard Business School historian Nancy Kane. Her new book
	...

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