Overview

My research focuses on crisis leadership and how leaders and their teams rise to the challenges of high-stakes situations. Using the lens of history, my work examines how individual leaders from business, government and other walks accomplish important—often seemingly impossible--missions; how they navigate both failure and great turbulence; how they use their emotional intelligence to help them do this; and how they inspire others to do the same.
The foundation that underlays my research, writing and speaking is the understanding that great leaders are made rather than born, and that some of the most critical experiences in the making of iconic leaders involve adversity, especially failure, loneliness and fear. In more than 20 years of studying courageous leaders, I have worked extensively on individuals such as Ernest Shackleton, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, the Nazi-resisting clergyman Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the environmental activist Rachel Carson, and Nelson Mandela among many others. I am currently researching a major study of civil rights leaders during the late 1950s and 1960s, with an eye to what we can learn today from their bravery, commitment, methods and purpose.