George Washington on Leadership

I just finished reading "George Washington on Leadership" by Richard Brookhiser. I'd read one of his previous books on Washington, "First Father" and had really enjoyed it, so I'd approached this with a degree of enthusiasm that, in the final analysis was not warranted.

I think that the biggest issue for me was that I was looking for more of what I'd gotten in the first book; fresh insight into Washington as a man and perhaps, given the title, insight into what made him so effective as a leader. Gouverneur Morris is quoted in the book as believing that a book on leadership was unlikely to give any real guidance on that score, and after reading this particular work, I'm apt to believe him.

The introduction is titled "Introduction: Founding CEO" so I certainly had some warnings that there would be trouble ahead, and while there were a few good facts and and some interesting background, the homily at the end of each chapter, the uneven flow, and the continuous effort to nail Washington's time to our own with cute phrases such as "Washinton Inc." when describing Washington's various business enterprises, for me at least just didn't work.

I suspect that Brookheiser's editor put him up to this and, while I don't know what a successful book on leadership is like, I'm pretty sure this isn't it.

Chosen at random: "Rules are useful in start-ups, but every rule needs a road test" (Page 22). The rule in this case referred to the practice, tried exactly one time, of having the president and the congress confer directly on a treaty, a literal rendering of the Senate's "advise and consent" role in the making of treaties.

Well, it was an interesting event. The fact that it was such a complete waste of time that the president, and all other president's to date, have avoided a repeat of it was also interesting, and I think that there were undoubtedly loads of ways that Washington's leadership was demonstrated in negotiating the Senate's approval of treaties, both this one and those to come, but the take-away for Brookheiser was that "rules are useful in start-ups, but every rule needs a road test". That's not the lesson that I would have taken, and doesn't seem to be the one that Washington took either. The lesson that he took from the event seems to be that it's best to avoid wasting a lot of time in meetings when your work can be accomplished with a few well placed letters and could also be delegated.

Chosen not so much at random: In the chapter titled "Avoid Weakness" he states that "Washington was far from first in speaking, in an age when oratory was at its height" (Page 200). That's all well and good but rather than dwelling on how Washington made the best of his limited oratorical talents, Brookheiser then goes on at length to describe great orators of his day; John Adams, Patrick Henry, and the English evangelist George Whitefield.

He goes through the same exercise with polemical writing describing Thomas Paine, William Cobbett, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and so forth from the standpoint of their polemical writing, and pointing out that Washington was not in that league and so stayed away from that aspect of writing.

I think that's fairly well known. What might have made the chapter interesting would have been some insight into how he managed in those instances where that sort of writing was called for. How did he engage with his staff or with any ghost writers that he may have used? Who knows?

All in all, an uneven work that didn't leave me very much farther in my understanding either of Washington, or leadership.