Real Leaders: Abraham Lincoln and the Power of Emotional Discipline

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 March 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1863, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln wrote a scathing letter to his top Union general, who had squandered a chance to end the Civil War. Then Lincoln folded it up and tucked it away in his desk. He never sent it. Lincoln understood that the first action that comes to mind is often counter-productive. In the third episode of a four-part special series on leadership, HBR Editor in Chief Adi Ignatius and Harvard Business School professor and historian Nancy Koehn explore Lincoln’s career both before and during America’s greatest crisis. They discover lessons on how to learn continuously, communicate values, and exercise emotional self-control.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Kurt Nick is here from Ideacast. I want to tell you about the Big Take
0:05.1	podcast from Bloomberg News. Each weekday they bring you one important story
0:10.0	from their global newsroom like how AI will upend your life and why China's
0:15.4	targeting the US dollar. Check out the big take from Bloomberg wherever you listen. Welcome to the HPR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Audie Ignatius.
0:35.0	This is Real Leaders, a special series examining the lives of some of the world's most
0:39.7	compelling and effective leaders past and present and the lessons that they offer today.
0:45.5	In our first two episodes we profiled the Polar Explorer Ernie Shackleton and then writer
0:50.4	and environmentalist Rachel Carson. This week, Abraham Lincoln.
0:55.0	A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.
1:05.3	The mystic chords of memory stretching from every battlefield and Patriot Grave to every
1:10.4	living heart and hearstone all over this broad land will yet swell the chorus
1:16.2	of the Union when again touched as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature.
1:24.0	Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent
1:28.3	a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
1:37.0	The words of Abraham Lincoln have endured.
1:40.0	He gave those three iconic speeches in the prelude to the Civil War and during the war itself.
1:45.0	At that time Lincoln was struggling to lead the U.S. through its greatest crisis,
1:49.0	and he was widely hated.
1:51.0	Now of course he's revered as the leader who's saved the nation.
1:55.0	Today we'll explore Lincoln's life and how he made himself into such an effective and enduring leader.
2:01.0	I'm Adi Ignatius, editor-in-chief of Harvard Business Review, and I'm here with
2:05.4	Nancy Kane, the great historian at Harvard Business School, who is research Lincoln's life and work.
	...

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