Blog: Books provide a nice break, offer lessons in leadership

It’s time for a break this week from the daily grind. So let’s talk about books.

Here are a handful of the nonfiction books that I read recently, and some of the leadership lessons I learned from them.

“Ten Caesars: Roman Emperors from Augustus to Constantine,” by Barry Strauss, is a compelling look at the CEOs of the Roman Empire, which, in its day, was the world’s greatest empire. But it eventually fell. Lesson No. 1: Don’t get cocky.

Strauss, a Cornell University history and classics professor, brings his famous subjects to life. He begins with Augustus, who brought down the Roman Republic and replaced it with the empire of which he was the first emperor. He was “a conqueror, a legislator, a builder and a priest.” He built a firm foundation for the empire, ruling wisely for decades.

His other subjects: Tiberius, Nero (who could not have fiddled while Rome burned, Strauss notes, because the fiddle wasn’t invented until the Middle Ages), Vespasian, Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, Septimius Severus, Diocletian and Constantine, the first Christian emperor.

Think you’ve got a tough CEO job today? Those emperors fought wars, scheming senators, aggressive rivals and, sometimes, murderous wives. Lesson No. 2: Beware of the mushrooms.

“The First Wave: The D-Day Warriors Who Led the Way to Victory in World War II,” by Alex Kershaw, tells the harrowing and courageous story of the first troops to invade Hitler’s Fortress Europe.

You’ll meet some fascinating characters, including Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the former president’s eldest son, who, despite a bad heart and a bum leg, begged his superiors to let him go ashore with the first wave. “I personally know both officers and men of these advance units and believe that it will steady them to know that I am with them,” Kershaw quotes Roosevelt as saying.

Roosevelt landed with the first wave at Utah Beach, leading his men across the beach and receiving only a slight wound. He died the next month in France, suffering a heart attack. General George Patton, an honorary pallbearer, wrote in his diary that Roosevelt was the bravest man he ever knew. Lesson No. 3: Leaders lead from the front.

In “American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race,” historian Douglas Brinkley recounts how President Kennedy harnessed his romanticism, charisma, press smarts (he was great on the rising new medium of television, as you may recall) and leadership skills to commit the nation to the bold goal of landing an American on the moon before the end of the decade and bringing him back safely to Earth. That “brazen moonshot call was among the most courageous statements and greatest gambles ever made by an American president,” Brinkley writes.

Kennedy’s energy crackles across the pages. He was a savvy, visionary leader. A sailor, he saw space as his “new ocean,” and he set America on a new journey of exploration. Sadly, he was not alive to see the dream he articulated become a reality with Apollo 11’s moon landing. Lesson No. 4: Set big goals.