Our doubts are traitors.
Well, that was quite a week.
On September 15, A Memorable Honor: Shakespeare, Lincoln, and the Art of Leadership was published. The publication of the book was the culmination of a journey that began in late 2024. When I embarked, I had no idea what that journey would entail. I’d never written a book and didn’t have a clue how to turn a few quotations from Henry V into a book that could sit on a stranger’s shelf. Thank the Lord for the good folks at Girl Friday Productions; I couldn’t have done it without them.
I will let you judge whether, as they say in the wilds of the economy, “the juice was worth the squeeze.” I’m proud of the book, and proud that it became a bestseller on Amazon, but I have no illusions that Brad Pitt will play me in the movie version. The point was always the book itself and its Shakespearean insights. That’s why the publication of the book last week represents such an important milestone for me.
Yet, from the beginning, this whole enterprise was freighted with the possibility of failure. To move forward, and to avoid being consumed by uncertainty and indecision, required a surprising degree of courage.
As I detail in A Memorable Honor, courage is one of the attributes that Shakespeare saw as vital in good leaders. Shakespeare understood the temptation for leaders to lose their way by lacking the boldness to take a well-considered risk. Hamlet, perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest creation, spent much of his eponymous play unable to act because he was “thinking to precisely on the event.” Indeed, the famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy finds Hamlet wrestling with his inability to avenge his father and lamenting that he has lost “the name of action.”
Boldness is not a synonym for recklessness, but a well-considered boldness is critical to a successful leader. Lincoln understood this fact: his great frustration during the early years of the Civil War was personified in Gen. George McClellan. McClellan was in many ways an able man; he built the Army of the Potomac, the principal Union weapon that ultimately won the war. At the same time, he was arrogant and dismissive of his Commander in Chief to the point of insubordination.
Lincoln could ignore McClellan’s arrogance, but he could not stomach McClellan’s greatest flaw: McClellan was strangely reluctant to engage the enemy. Lincoln constantly encouraged the General to press the attack and use the North’s superiority in manpower and materiel to defeat the South. Lincoln saw McClellan’s reluctance as one of the greatest impediments to a Union victory.
McClellan clearly never read Julius Caesar:
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves
Or lose our ventures.
Lincoln finally found his “full sea” by replacing McClellan with U.S. Grant. Recognizing his boldness and commitment, Lincoln said of Grant, “Grant is my man, and I am his for the rest of the war.” He stood by Grant, in good times and bad, until the war was won.
Most of us do not face such momentous challenges that so test our mettle, but even in our little lives we confront moments every day that require courage. That is especially true of when we find ourselves leading other men and women. Our people need a leader’s (judicious) boldness; their success, and the success of the whole organization, depends on it.
To those of you who have already bought A Memorable Honor: Shakespeare, Lincoln, and the Art of Leadership, thanks! If you haven’t done so yet, you can buy the book today on Amazon.com and the Barnes and Noble websites. Hurry, or Brad Pitt may snap up all the copies.
Until next time.
Frank
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