One Tip for Enhancing Your Leadership Skills

 
Issue #21: November 30, 2002

To our readers:

We wish you a joyous Holiday Season and a healthful and prosperous New Year!

For this season that so often overwhelms us with demands, possibilities, and joys, we offer a simple tip for enhancing your leadership expertise: Read a book by one of the great thinkers of the world.

If this seems a poor use of time when you're already inundated by practical things to do, consider this: " . . . even before Enron, studies showed that executives who fail -- financially as well as morally -- rarely do so from a lack of technical expertise. Rather, they fail because they lack interpersonal skills and practical wisdom; what Aristotle called prudence." These words, from a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper column by Thomas K. Lindsay, provost of the University of Dallas, preface his argument for the importance of a liberal arts education. Lindsay notes that a liberal arts education--which includes history, philosophy, literature, theology and logic--provides an education in moral reasoning, and "fosters ethical leadership as no other training can because it gives students the life-transforming exercise of engaging in conversations with history's greatest thinkers and doers."

Now is the time to read the books you might have avoided like the plague when you were in school. By reading the "great books," you can benefit from the same education enjoyed by such great leaders as Winston Churchill, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and many more. Lindsay argues that Churchill's immersion in great works like Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics contributed to his ". . . greatness of soul [which] explains Churchill's moral capacity in the 1930s--when he was out of office, discredited and ridiculed-- to stand up and rouse a slumbering world to the coming danger of Nazism."

You too can reach for a "greatness of soul" by delving into the thoughts and arguments of history's greatest minds. In fact, you enjoy an advantage over Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, because their lists of great books were significantly shorter than the ones available to you today. This is not to say you will discover only great truths. According to Mortimer Adler, cofounder of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas, www.thegreatideas.org/index.html , "... There is much more error in the great books than there is truth. By anyone's criteria of what is true or false, the great books will be found to contain some truths, but many more mistakes and errors." It is not their ultimate truth that makes the great books great, but their timelessness--their continued relevance to the problems and issues of our times, and their relevance to the great ideas and great issues that have occupied great thinkers for 2500 years, according to Adler.

Now the internet makes it easier than ever to see what the great books offer. Following are four internet sites that offer lists of the great books and suggestions for how to read them. Take 15 minutes to visit the sites and see which one makes the most sense to you. Find a book you'd like to read.



Four internet sites that introduce you to the Great Books:

1. Great Books Online, www.bartleby.com

This site offers The Harvard Classics and The Shelf of Fiction which, according to the site, constitute "the most comprehensive and well-researched anthology of all time [and] comprises both the 50-volume '5-foot shelf of books' and the 20-volume Shelf of Fiction. Together they cover every major literary figure, philosopher, religion, folklore and historical subject through the twentieth century."

2. Great Books Index, http://books.mirror.org/gb.home.html

This site provides indices, by author and by title, of great books that are online in English translation. It also provides links to ongoing conversations about the books, and to other sites that focus on great books.

3. The Great Books, sponsored by Access Foundation, www.anova.org/

This is a compilation of more than 240 great authors and their works. According to the site, "The Access Foundation ListŠ is liberal in scope, robust in its cataloging, and voluminously linked to other sites related to the study of literature. This list devotes notable attention to works of philosophy and science, and is unrivaled in its organizational structure, background, and biographical content on the authors listed."

4. Great Books Lists: Lists of Classics, Eastern and Western Canons, Contemporary Canon, and other lists of great books, www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/greatbks.html
Check out this site for lists of classics organized by era, e.g. the Western Canon is divided into the Theocratic Age, the Aristocratic Age, the Democratic Age, and our own 20th century--the Chaotic Age. It includes a "Lifetime's Reading: The World's 500 Greatest Books," which is organized into 50 years' worth of reading! The site includes the reading lists from Columbia and St. John's College as well as others.

Follow the lead of the greatest minds and read the greatest books. The more you understand the great books, the more prepared you will be to make sense of your business and career, and how they fit into the greater world.