Month: December 2025

I know how to learn.

Those were the exact words that Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain used in his solicitation to form a regiment of Maine volunteers to serve the cause of the Union in 1862. Abraham Lincoln had just issued a call for 300,000 more troops, and Chamberlain, just getting himself established as a professor at Bowdoin College, responded.

And learn he did. According to a new biography, On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain by Ronald C. White, Chamberlain was to learn much about what it takes to lead men into battle. His ability to lead came from his talent for bringing people together for a common purpose, something he had been doing as a teacher and prospective pastor.

His learning climaxed on July 2, 1863, at the Battle of the Little Round Top at Gettysburg. The 20th Maine Chamberlain’s regiment had the high ground and fought regiments from Alabama for hours. When they ran out of ammunition, Chamberlain gave the call to fix bayonets and charge down the hill. This effort so terrified the rebels that they turned tail and ran. The 20th Maine’s action on that day may have saved the Union. Had General Robert E. Lee’s forces been victorious at Gettysburg, they would have had an easy road to Washington, D.C., and its possible capture.

Chamberlain served an additional two years, becoming gravely wounded in 1864, causing him pain for the rest of his life. He returned to Maine, served as its governor, and returned to Bowdoin to become its president. While Chamberlain was active in planning the 50th anniversary of Gettysburg in 1913, his final illness prevented him from attending. He died the following year.

Lifetime of learning

Learning was central to Chamberlain’s life. And from him, we can take notes of how we can learn. My late father, a family physician, used to tell me that you go to college to learn how to learn. Chamberlain is the exemplar of Dad’s mantra. Here’s how.

Step back. Chamberlain was offered the colonelcy of the regiment, but he deferred to a former Adelbert Ames, an 1861 graduate of West Point who had been wounded at the First Battle of Bull Run. Chamberlain stuck close to Ames, a young man ten years his junior seeking to learn as much as possible.

Study hard. As White notes in his biography, Chamberlain hit the books hard both to qualify for entry into Bowdoin and later to catch up to his classmates after losing a year to illness. He continued his studies, writing to his wife Fanny, “I study, I tell you, every military work I can find.”

Set aside what you think you know. While Chamberlain had studied military strategy and tactics, he had not worn the uniform. Before the 20th Maine got its first taste of battle, Chamberlain observed combat maneuvers as his troops were held in reserve. Unlike Ames, a regular Army officer, he also understood that his was an army of volunteers and treated them with respect for their service.

Learn as you lead. Chamberlain had led a quiet life before the Civil War, even intending to become a minister or missionary after graduating from Bangor Theological Seminary. He opted for marriage and academics, but the war gave him a different education – raw, brutal, and violent. It enabled him to continue to lead, eventually becoming a general and serving as such when the Lee surrendered at Appomattox in April 1865. 

“Taking charge of your own learning is a part of taking charge of your life,” wrote Warren Bennis, like Chamberlain, a combat veteran at the Battle of the Bugle and later a professor and university president.

Leaders must learn to see the world as it is, not simply what they imagine it to be. Their perceptions become real when they are tested by adversity and challenged to respond to the call to serve.

First posted on Forbes.com 7.02.2024

“Part of resilience is shouldering the burden of knowledge to make a difference.”

Writes Joseph Pfeifer, the first on-scene battalion fire chief at the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan on 9/11. The comment, contained in his memoir Ordinary Heroes, refers to his initial reluctance to accept a promotion to deputy chief in the months after 9/11. 

Pfeifer was wrestling with the strain of working on the Pile (and later the Pit) to recover the remains of those who perished in the collapse of the towers. He also experienced personal loss; his brother Kevin was killed in the collapse, along with 343 fellow firefighters and first-responders. (Additionally more than 340 first-responders have died of complications suffered while working at the site of the collapse.)

Pfeifer realized upon reflection that he could make a difference, and he did. Pfeifer served another 17 years in the NYFD, eventually becoming the department’s Chief of Counterterrorism and Emergency Preparedness. And, together with faculty from West Point, Pfeifer taught a leadership course on counter-terrorism, the first of its kind for first responders. 

Resilience is generative

Pfeifer’s words on resilience illuminate something that is often overlooked when we consider resilience. It is the ability to learn from it, yes, but the capacity and duty to share those lessons with others. Resilience is critical to leadership because only some things go into play. Setbacks are inevitable. Tragedies may occur. Yet leaders are responsible for helping their people navigate the challenges.

While we hope plans will work, we know in our hearts and from experience that only some things do so. It falls to leaders to rise to the occasion and provide a way forward – as Pfeifer writes, with a sense of hope and the ability to unite people. 

Building on hope

Toward the end of his memoir, Pfeifer writes, “The heart of crisis leadership is the ability to sustain hope by unifying efforts to solve complex problems in the face of great tragedy.” When we experience adversity, we look to leaders to mobilize the team to act. Such mobilization then becomes a collective act. At the same time, significant challenges take time to solve. So, while solutions are still being formulated, leaders can do what Pfeifer advocates: give followers a sense of hope. Leaders who model this behavior not only provide emotional sustenance for themselves. They can nourish their own well-being with the knowledge they are making a positive difference by the example of their perseverance.

Nelson Mandela knew such an experience from having spent 27 years as a prisoner on Robbin Island off the coast of Capetown, South Africa. “Do not judge me by my success,” he wrote, “judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.” 

Resilience, honed from adversity, becomes a source of strength to persevere as well as to teach others how to do the same.

First posted in Forbes.com on 3.08.2024

One does not just read Phil Klay; one experiences his writing deeply. Be it fiction or nonfiction, Klay’s writing evokes a visceral response. He writes about what it is like to be in a war zone and how that experience shapes everything that happens next. 

A Marine who served in Iraq, Klay is a writer who is equally at home in both fiction and nonfiction. His first book of short stories, Redeployment won the National Book Award in 2014. President Barack Obama cited his debut novel, Missionaries, as one of his favorites of 2020, the year it was published.

Seeking to explain

Klay’s newest work is Uneven Ground: Citizenship in an Era of Endless, Invisible War. The essays contained within trace his thoughts and feelings about what the war and its after-effects were having on the nation he had served. His work is very relevant to anyone in management because his insights into what it takes to lead in a time of uncertainty and ambiguity ring true.

In a review for the New York Times, James Fallows, an author and long-time commentator on national defense issues, writes that “the book is engrossing and important, and I hope readers will start with the longest parts first.” It is in the long parts, as in Klay’s fiction, that we feel the power of his story and the truths he tells.

Connectedness in a time of conflict

In an interview Klay told me, “Joining the military breaks you out of your bubble… You meet every kind of person in the military, which is one of the great things about it. And you’re all bound together by and stamped with a common identity and common purpose. You have a sort of common, intense experiences because you all go through the same sort of training and are gearing up to the same conflicts.”

Coming home can be challenging.  “When sometimes the veterans have difficult experiences suggesting to the civilian world, the assumption is that it’s because of negative things that they experience in the military.’ As true as that may be, Klay says, “It’s also important to note that there’s a lot of positive things about life in the military,” such as the sense of bonding, trust, and “a sense of broader purpose and mission.” Klay admits, “Of course, war makes you feel as though what you’re doing is extremely important because the stakes are life and death. That can be in some ways intoxicating.”

Klay offers advice for loved ones of combat veterans who have experienced some kind of trauma. “Ask him first to [talk about] the good things in his deployment. The people he loved and why he went in.” It is important, says Klay, to get the context, the totality of the experience beyond the bad experiences. “Whereas it’s the connections between people and the love between people and the, the richness of life that is destroyed in war. You need to understand that richness of life first for any of the bad things to have any kind of meaning.”

Diplomacy in conflict

War, as Klay explains, can teach diplomacy. This lesson was imparted to him when he witnessed the reaction of Special Forces Major Ian Fishback to the loss of two soldiers. It would have been acceptable for him to retaliate with more force, but Fishback opted for another course. “What he knew was that this was an extremely fragile situation that could have easily exploded into widespread violence. And so he went with the political solution, not knowing how it would turn out, whether it would be a good thing in the end.” 

Klay adds, “We often substitute an easy problem, which is, can I kill this guy with a hard problem, which is, can I operate in this region in a way that will, in the long-term lead to a more stable settlement that is in everybody’s interest.”

Sadly, such diplomacy is not serving those Afghans who worked with Americans and are still in Afghanistan. “The wars of the sort that we have waged where a lot was asked of a very small number of people, we haven’t even lived up to the promises that we made to those who helped us.” Such a policy reveals “an unwillingness to deal with the sort of after-effects of that [war] in a serious way.”

Personal stories

The stories that Klay tells resonate with humanity, none more powerfully than the story of Chaplain Patrick McLaughlin. In addition to offering support for Marines, the chaplain made a point of comforting the children, particularly those wounded fatally. “Chaps”  ,-McLaughlin would rock them in his arms as they died. He had a rocking chair for every victim and when he left the base to return to the States, he burned them all in a bonfire. Klay writes that Chaps “watched as the embers rose heavenward to, as he put it, ‘the children that once occupied them in my arms.’”

It is those after affects—most only soldiers and veterans – that Klay explores in his writing. And in doing so he casts a light on the effect of the war on his generation and the nation it served. Klay’s voice has urgency that compels us to listen and by listening to the issues facing, not simply those with direct experience of war, but also their families as well as the psyche of the nation that sent them there.

First posted on Forbes.com 8.08.2022

Resilience became a watchword of our pandemic year and beyond. 

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Mark Edmundson, an author and professor of English at the University of Virginia, argues that Ralph Waldo Emerson, a giant of poetic letters, is an excellent example of resilience. Emerson, like so many of that era, knew loss up close and personally. His wife died at 19, and his eldest son died at age five. 

“Life only avails not the having lived,” wrote Emerson in his essay, “Self-Reliance.” “Power ceases in the instant of repose, it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.” 

Edmundson himself writes, channeling Emerson, “Don’t make yourself a patient, don’t plump the mattress or pickle yourself in Cabernet. Instead, make life more demanding than it has been. Be tougher on yourself; fill your mind with your tasks and go after them, hard. When we’re down, we need to get up and fight as best we can—not tomorrow, but now.”

There is much to unpack in Emerson’s approach. For many, when stricken with grief, the solution is to persevere in life’s journey and with life’s calling. Some individuals, as we saw during our past year, have done this swimmingly. They have persisted despite tragedy. Others, perhaps the majority, need time to reflect, recharge and yes, mourn. 

Perseverance without acknowledgment of suffering may be short-sighted. You may sublimate your emotions, and ultimately yourself, with this approach. Doing so may hinder your ability to achieve better results.

Coping with loss

So many great artists, like Emerson, suffered significant loss. Great leaders, too, notably Theodore Roosevelt, suffered a loss. Like Emerson, TR lost his first wife. All of them channeled their feelings, or in our common parlance, “processed” the loss and integrated it into their lives. They emerged stronger for it, and their work attests to that fact.

Resilience is the ability to come back from defeat. To rise again, but as I have learned in this past year, it’s also the ability to meet the challenges of a transformed world. The world of January 2020 is no more; our duty is to create a “new normal” that embodies the best of what we had with the best of what we have learned. We will need resilience to do so.

Learned resilience

Over the past year, I have conducted over 100 interviews with women and men from different walks of life. One of them, Garrett Tennant, a Royal Marine, spoke about resilience can be learned through training. What special forces troops do is subject themselves to danger in training and, in the process, learn to adapt by monitoring their reactions and their behaviors so when they are in a combat situation, they know how to act. The fear does not dissipate; it is managed.

Others I interviewed told me how they, as business leaders imbued their organizations with resilience. They did it through their example. They put themselves out front, sharing their thoughts about the road ahead. They counseled individuals and also sought help themselves when necessary. Such leaders set an example that adversity is real, but so is our ability to manage it.

Nowhere is resilience more critical than in modern healthcare. The past year saw practitioners—physicians, nurses, aides—stressed to the max when dealing with the overload of Covid-19 patients. A few tragically broke under the weight of the burden. Fortunately, the overwhelming majority did not, but they did not emerge unscathed. It will take years of processing the stress of the pandemic before they are entirely whole.

Resilience is also a physical reaction to stimuli. As my colleague, Dr. Sharon Melnick, a clinical psychologist, teaches, we need to learn the practice of self-regulation. We cannot always be on; sometimes, we need to be off. Failure to do so leads to burnout. 

Shared resilience

Resilience need not be a solo enterprise. Some, like Emerson, can muscle through it, but most of us need to decompress, talk to colleagues and seek professional help to regain our equilibrium. We do heal ourselves, but doing so need not be in isolation.

Resilience, some say, is like a muscle. You can build it up, but if you don’t use it, it will atrophy. Never have we had a time when resilience is more necessary. So let’s use it.

First posted on Forbes.com 7/09/2021

Perfection within the field of human performance is a myth. Yet it persists. 

In a recent interview with host Terry Gross on Fresh Air, a renowned cellist said, “What allows me to not be paralyzed is to just say, I’m doing my best. And if it doesn’t work, you know my intention is to do the best.” 

Ma added that he kept himself alive and working, avoiding burnout by saying, “How do you rejuvenate, regenerate, and constantly be curious and active and do your best? I try and forgive myself because I don’t want to be neurotic.”

Limits to perfection

Understanding one’s limitations is often difficult for high achievers. Musicians says Ma may push themselves into the trap of the “industrial aesthetic”—error-free performance, as can be done in manufacturing.

Seeking further insights, I asked Tiffany Chang, an orchestra conductor, “I tell musicians that each performance doesn’t need to be exactly the same. It’s easy for a musician to have an ideal product in mind, and we spend all our efforts to recreate that ideal in practice. That is not always practical! The phrasing, tempo changes, and the tough corners don’t need to be executed in the exact same way. It is more important to be aware of each other at the moment and to navigate these passages together.” 

“I remind them that perfection is not the destination,” says Chang. “Taking a step toward better is the goal. There is no one perfect interpretation. There is only our interpretation that is right for us today because of all the factors, human and otherwise, we are faced with today. It’s helpful to focus on being better rather than being perfect.”

“I help my musicians by providing them with an interpretation, while giving them artistic licenses and space to find a way to realize that musical image on their own, rather than giving them step by step instructions or micromanaging,” says Change. “I give them the basis for a story, and ask them to find and perform the evidence in the music that supports and paints that particular story.”

“Tactile Thinking”

One way YoYo Ma keeps himself fresh is by employing different modes of thinking. Analytical thinking focuses on facts. Empathetic thinking focuses on feeling, but there is another thing – “tactile thinking.” His wife knows what he is doing because she can picture him working through “fingering and bowing” on the cello without playing. Ma says many others do the same, whether golf or tennis, thinking about how you will play a shot or react to a ball hitting you.

Chang says, “It’s easy to simply think ‘I just want it to be better’ which is quite vague and can lead to more of a reactive and passive rather than proactive approach.” By contrast, Chang works as their coach. “I ask musicians to think about one, two or three specific goals they want to tackle each rehearsal and each performance.” 

A good way – perhaps the best way – to keep in sync with self and others is via listening. Chang says, “Listening is crucial to achieve this connection and synergy.” How a piece is performed a given way one time does not dictate how it must be played the next time. “It’s more important that we are in sync with each other right now and supporting each other in today’s performance, rather than going rogue or being stubborn to do it ‘more right’ against a theoretical ideal.”

And that’s not bad advice for the rest of us. Listen and collaborate, and see what good things can happen.

First posted on Forbes.com 6.20.2024