What is the connection between literature and leadership? Are leaders born or are they made? Elizabeth D. Samet, the author of the award-winning Soldier's Heart and a professor of English at West Point, brings to this anthology her profound experiences as a teacher of soldiers, her discerning ear for excellent writing, and her belief in the vital role of the humanities in cultivating leaders. Great writers and thinkers in conversation-that is what makes Samet's approach distinctive. Samet organizes the writings around the essence of leadership-the insights, skills, and actions that effective leaders, with time and experience, learn to live by. What are these insights, skills, and actions? Newcomers to any organization must first study the system, then find and emulate models, risk change, cultivate trust, negotiate, take responsibility, learn from failure, learn to resist, innovate, discipline desire, and eventually let go. These ideas, brought to life in selections written by or about unforgettable leaders-be they heroic, quixotic, or villainous-shape the book. Machiavelli, Macbeth, and Milosz, Ghandi and Gawande, Douglass and Didion are just a sampling of the 102 writers and works included. Readers of Leadership will enjoy its sheer variety at the same time that they enter a thought-provoking, often moving conversation that is both ancient and crucially current.
Author Biography:
Elizabeth D. Samet is author of No Man's Land: Preparing for War and Peace in Post-9/11 America and Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2007 by the New York Times. Her essays and reviews have been published in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, and the New Republic. She is a winner of the Hiett Prize in the Humanities and a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Samet speaks often to both civilian and military audiences on the role of literature in shaping future military officers, and she was a member of the Army Chief of Staff's Task Force on Leader Development. She is a professor of English at West Point.
