Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham shares his insights in this Listening to Leaders interview on how leaders develop a vision and then translate it into an agenda. The biographer of such presidents as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and George H.W. Bush also discusses the importance of leaders offering hope for a better day, learning from their defeats, knowing how to work with those whom they differ, and being able to learn and grow.
How do you define great leadership?
The capacity of an individual who can bend reality to his or her purposes for the good. Transformational leadership is essentially a human undertaking. There are perils and promises, and it's always contingent. But, in the end, great leaders leave the nation and the world in a stronger, more enduring, and more charitable place than when they began.
How have the presidents and leaders you've studied developed their vision? What animated it?
Character is destiny, as the Greeks taught us. They were, as Tennyson put it when he wrote Ulysses, part of all that they've met. When they come to that point of crisis, they are bringing to bear everything they've experienced, everything they've read, everything they've learned, everything they haven't learned.
I do believe leaders bring all of their experiences to bear in different moments that could go either way. And I use the word "crisis" advisedly in the Greek sense, as a moment of decision.
All of that vision starts way before the moment?
Totally.
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