Welcome to the politics guys. I'm Michael Baranowski, a political scientist at Northern Kentucky University.

My guest today is historian Nancy Kane, who holds the James E. Robeson chair of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

Dr. Kane's research focuses on effective leadership and how leaders past and present craft lives of purpose, worth, and impact. She's the author of multiple books, including Ernest Shackleton,

exploring leadership, the story of American business from the pages of the New York Times,

and brand new how entrepreneurs earned customers trust from Wedgwood to Dell. Her latest book is

forged in crisis, the power of courageous leadership in turbulent times, which has just been

released. Kirkus Reviews calls it engaging and unusually rewarding as well as wise, thoughtful,

and valuable. And I couldn't agree more. Dr. Kane, welcome to the show. Thank you, Michael.

I'm delighted to be here. So to start with, can you talk a little bit about why you decided to

write Forged in Crisis? Well, I wrote the book, although I didn't understand this at the time,

I wrote the book because I found myself in the

midst of a perfect storm of crises, none of which I had seen coming. My father dropped dead,

my husband walked out on me in the marriage, a horrific divorce ensued. I got cancer,

then I got cured, then I got cancer again. And all of that happened in a very short period of time.

And I didn't understand how to make sense, how even to navigate through the high winds and big waves

of these calamities. And one night, early on, early on in the midst of the, you know, the Gale

or swins, I grabbed a copy of Lincoln's collected writings, a condensed version, but still a

hefty volume in itself. And I started reading about Mr. Lincoln. And I was reading from the

back of his writing, so the end of his life, the presidency at the end of the Civil War, if you will, backward into time.

And the more read, the more I became fascinated by how leaders, people in positions of, you know, great responsibility with great authority.

And as it turned out with big, worthy, hefty missions, you know, what they learned

in crises, how they steered through it, how they held on to their larger, better selves,

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