Hearts Touched with Fire

This instant New York Times bestseller is an "inspiring and useful" (The Washington Post) guide to the art of leadership from David Gergen-former White House adviser to four US presidents, CNN analyst, and founder of the Harvard Center for Public Leadership.

As nations careen from one crisis to the next, there is a growing cry for fresh leadership. Those in charge have relatedly fallen short, and trust in institutions have plummeted. So, what does great leadership look like? And how are great leaders made?

David Gergen, a leader in the public arena for more than half a century, draws from his experiences as a White House adviser to four presidents, his decades as a trusted voice on national issues, and years of teaching and mentoring young people to offer a stirring playbook for the next generation of change-makers.

To uncover the fundamental elements of effective leadership, Gergen traves the journeys of iconic leaders past and present, from pathbreakers like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Lewis, John McCain, and Harvey Milk to historic icons like Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill, and Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, to contemporary game changers like Greta Thunberg, the Parkland students, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Leadership is a journey that starts from within, Gergen writes. A leader must become self-aware and then achieve self-mastery. You cannot lead others until you can lead yourself. As you start to leap into the world, you begin your outer journey, overcoming setbacks, persuading others, empowering them, and navigating crises-armed with a sense of history, humor, passion, and purpose.

By linking lessons of the past with the ever-changing practice of leadership today, Gergen reveals the time-tested secrets of dynamic leadership. A "clarion call for lives dedicated to service and leadership" (Doris Kearns Goodwin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Leadership), Hearts Touched with Fire distills experience and wisdom of the past into an invaluable guide for leaders of our future.

Autorentext
David Gergen has been a leader in the public arena for more than half a century. He has served as a White House adviser to four US presidents of both parties: Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton. Gergen then served as the editor of US News & World Report. For the past two decades, he has served as a professor of public service and founding director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is also a senior political analyst for CNN where he is a respected voice in national and international affairs.

Klappentext

This instant New York Times bestseller is an “inspiring and useful” (The Washington Post) guide to the art of leadership from David Gergen—former White House adviser to four US presidents, CNN analyst, and founder of the Harvard Center for Public Leadership.

As nations careen from one crisis to the next, there is a growing cry for fresh leadership. Those in charge have relatedly fallen short, and trust in institutions have plummeted. So, what does great leadership look like? And how are great leaders made?

David Gergen, a leader in the public arena for more than half a century, draws from his experiences as a White House adviser to four presidents, his decades as a trusted voice on national issues, and years of teaching and mentoring young people to offer a stirring playbook for the next generation of change-makers.

To uncover the fundamental elements of effective leadership, Gergen traves the journeys of iconic leaders past and present, from pathbreakers like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Lewis, John McCain, and Harvey Milk to historic icons like Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill, and Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, to contemporary game changers like Greta Thunberg, the Parkland students, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Leadership is a journey that starts from within, Gergen writes. A leader must become self-aware and then achieve self-mastery. You cannot lead others until you can lead yourself. As you start to leap into the world, you begin your outer journey, overcoming setbacks, persuading others, empowering them, and navigating crises—armed with a sense of history, humor, passion, and purpose.

By linking lessons of the past with the ever-changing practice of leadership today, Gergen reveals the time-tested secrets of dynamic leadership. A “clarion call for lives dedicated to service and leadership” (Doris Kearns Goodwin, Pulitzer Prize­–winning author of Leadership), Hearts Touched with Fire distills experience and wisdom of the past into an invaluable guide for leaders of our future.

Zusammenfassung
This instant New York Times bestseller is an inspiring and useful (The Washington Post) guide to the art of leadership from David Gergenformer White House adviser to four US presidents, CNN analyst, and founder of the Harvard Center for Public Leadership.

Leseprobe
Chapter One: Hearts Touched with Fire ONE HEARTS TOUCHED WITH FIRE
He could have ducked.

His father was a prominent physician and intellectual, his mother a major abolitionist, his family well connected. So when President Lincoln issued his first call for volunteers in the Civil War, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. could have easily ignored it.

Instead, he dropped out of Harvard College and signed up as a first lieutenant in the 20th Massachusetts, putting his life on the line for the sake of his country. He answered the call. In battles that followed, Confederate bullets struck him down repeatedly-at Ball's Bluff, Antietam, and Chancellorsville. In one battle, he was shot in the chest and barely survived; in another, he was shot in the neck and left for dead.

But as his biographer Mark DeWolfe Howe has written, those grievous wounds did not diminish his life. They instead shaped and strengthened his public leadership for the next seventy years. Even as he witnessed so much death and destruction, his inner steel hardened, and his aspirations for America grew. He rose to become one of the nation's most influential and eloquent jurists, named to the Supreme Court by Teddy Roosevelt and serving until FDR reached the White House.

Some years after the Civil War, in a speech on Memorial Day in 1884, Holmes described how military service had inspired his generation. "As life is action and passion," he said, "it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.... Through our great good fortune, in our youth, our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing."

"In our youth, our hearts were touched with fire."

What a glorious way to capture what so many young men and women have experienced in one era after another in committing themselves to civic life, seeking to create a fairer, more just, and more peaceful world. Life will hold perils, but in devoting yourself to the service of others, you find a satisfaction that transcends your troubles. As many have discovered, service and leadership are inextricably bound together. Indeed, leadership at its best is service to others.
BUT DO LEADERS REALLY MATTER?
In one generation after another, down to our day, we have seen the joy and inner peace that comes to leaders who work tirelessly to serve others. Think of Jane Addams in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, creating Hull House to serve as many as two thousand women a week; she was the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize. Or the many creations of Albert Schweitzer in the first half of the twentieth century, including the hospital he built in Africa, at Lambaréné. Schweitzer believed that &…