Forged in Crisis

Acclaimed Harvard Business School professor, Nancy Koehn, draws lessons from leaders who triumphed in turbulent times in Forged in Crisis. What do Ernest Shackleton, Rachel Carson, and Howard Schultz have in common? Each led frightened people forward to success despite overwhelming odds. While other leaders could have panicked in the face of the obstacles each faced, these extraordinary leaders displayed stunning abilities to exert lasting influence despite turbulence, disruption, and personalities that may have masked their abilities. There are many lessons to be learned from these great leaders, for businesspeople undergoing the stress of a disrupted market, halting economy, or shrinking morale. To solve this problem, Nancy Koehn has taken the lives of a handful of great leaders and broken them down to make them more approachable. By examining their individual values, strategies, and trade-offs, she extracts simple and relevant leadership lessons. For example: -Despite a series of setbacks that left him and his men in life-threatening circumstances on a 1912 expedition to Antarctica, Ernest Shackleton managed to keep his team moving forward so that they returned home safely. His story is a lesson in staying motivated and reassessing your goals in the wake of failure. -Rachel Carson managed to single-handedly warn the world of the danger of pesticides and advance the cause of environmental protection despite a history of health problems, a difficult personal life, and backlash from entire industries who wanted to discredit her work in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Her's is a lesson in the power of quiet and diligent perseverance. Nancy F. Koehn is a historian at the Harvard Business School where she holds the James E. Robison chair of Business Administration. Specializing in entrepreneurial leadership, she consults with many businesses and writes frequently for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Huffington Post.