War Stories [Paperback]

After close to 20 years' exploring the topic of leadership with men and women from the private sector, the public sector, and civil society, I have come to believe that stories, told in all their complexity but shaped to draw an audience, offer the only lasting means of teaching and exercising leadership. Leadership that recognizes context and bridges individual, organizational, and systems responsibility will take us down the path of conflict and, sometimes, principled contradiction; it will acknowledge the importance of inspiration and aspiration, the utilitarianism of Kant and the righteousness of Machiavelli. The truth about, and effectiveness of, good leadership lies in the recognition of mixed motives and contradictory imperatives, and the pragmatic striving for the simple narrative that lies beyond them. The test case for successful leadership in 21st-century America lies in the stories that allow us to reimagine how we might now govern our selves, our organizations, and our democracy. As we approached the end of the last century, Steven Spielberg built an Academy Award-winning film about leadership in time of war in Saving Private Ryan (1998). In the age of Obama, Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa introduced the corrective of hanging a Private-Ryan equivalent, the hapless ex-Marine Nicholas Brody, at the end of the third season of the Emmy-winning TV series Homeland (2013). The first looked back at the so-called 'good war,' fought by the 'greatest generation,' and displays all the iconography of patriotism and inherited duty. The second has captured aspects of the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East both at home and abroad, portraying wars that have been fought by a fraction of one percent of our population, yet involve us all in their material and spiritual complications. Given that disjunction and the reality of our continuing and apparently inevitable conflictual engagements at home and abroad, 'War Stories' asks how America should imagine itself for the new l&