My choices for inspiration in 2018 for books and movies lie outside the traditional leadership genre but nonetheless provide lessons leaders can find illuminating.
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Inspiration for me can be as simple as opening a book or watching a movie.
My choices for inspiration this year lie outside the leadership genre but nonetheless provide lessons leaders can find illuminating.
The Great Halifax Explosion is a story of the triumph of the human spirit in the face of tragedy. Told convincingly and powerfully by my friend John U. Bacon, the book centers on the explosion in Halifax harbor caused by the collision of a munitions ship and a war-relief vessel. The disaster inflicted on the city reveals the horror of man-made weaponry off-set by the will of motivated individuals to provide assistance to those in harm’s way.
Love That Boy is Ron Fournier’s story of coming to terms with his son Tyler’s Asperger’s syndrome. As a former White House correspondent, Fournier introduced Tyler, an avid history buff, to three presidents including sit-down meetings with Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush. Tyler emerges from the pages of this memoir not as a kid “with something wrong with him,” but as a teen who knows himself and has much to teach us—as does his father.
Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics by Stephen Greenblatt looks to the Bard’s plays for insights into characters who have made all the wrong choices–Richard II, Macbeth, King Lear—to name but three. By focusing on a lack of leadership (as well as the “enablers” who support it), Greenblatt depicts the horrors of what can go wrong with people at the top have only themselves to preserve.
Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created is a panorama of America discovering itself through the lens of celebrity and public relations.
