Book Review: Leadership in Turbulent Times

Leadership in Turbulent Times
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Biography

Doris Kearns Goodwin is an outstanding writer. Team of Rivals is a classic for a reason. Wait Till Next Year is a wonderful memoir. The Bully Pulpit is an insightful and sometimes moving triple portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the progressive press.

Leadership in Turbulent Times is a business book.

It's not bad. As a reading experience, in fact, it's pretty good. It serves as an interesting four-way parallel biography of four presidents--Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. It proposes an interesting thesis, which is that these represent four different types of leadership (transformational, crisis, turnaround, visionary). But the business book is a fundamentally limited endeavor, and Goodwin doesn't transcend those limitations.

The weakest part of Leadership in Turbulent Times, in fact, is its most business-book-y part--the third of its four sections. The first two sections are narrative and descriptive, describing her protagonists' childhood and formative political experiences. She goes one president at a time, in chronological order. That works fine. It lets her compare and contrast each man at analogous points in their lives. 

But in the third section Goodwin veers down into the swamp of distilling the biographies into maxims, and the four-way structure doesn't cut it. She should have organized section by leadership practice, and then show how the four presidents applied them--differently, similarly, or both. Instead,  every president is treated in sequence. There are a lot of problems with this, but here are the killers:

1. It's shallow. By drawing on each leader's life individually, Goodwin's text is reduced to a series of platitudes. Of course it's good to "Lead with your strengths," to "Bring all stakeholders aboard," and so forth. Did anyone doubt it?
2. It's not coherent. Any litany of this sort is bound to be littered with contradictions, of the "don't look before you leap" vs. "he who hesitates is lost" variety.
3. It's forgettable. By the time you get to "Know when to hold back, know when to move forward" (Lyndon Johnson), you've probably forgotten about "Acknowledge when failed policies demand a change in direction" (Lincoln).
4. It doesn't support Goodwin's own taxonomy. If you want to establish that transformational leadership is actually distinct from crisis leadership, for example, you need to establish that the "transformational" rubric "Tell the truth" doesn't apply, or at least applies differently, in the "crisis" case. Using silos doesn't do that.

Regrettably, this is what business books do: provide a series of shallow, easily-parroted buzzwords that simple minds can easily turn into shibboleths (and bumper stickers). I'm not a fan of the genre. I'm still a fan of Goodwin's; I just don't think Leadership in Turbulent Times plays to her strengths.