In January 2008, CBS anchor Katie Couric asked Barack Obama which one book he would take with him to the White House, apart from the Bible. The eventual winner of the presidential election singled out Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 best-selling account of President Abraham Lincoln’s leadership during the Civil War.
In the months following his election victory, President Obama has made it clear that he is modeling his leadership on the style of his presidential predecessor from Illinois. By bringing heavyweight politicians who are themselves past and future presidential contenders into his cabinet, Obama has reprised Lincoln’s strategy of creating a team composed of his most able rivals, people who are unafraid to take issue with him and are confident of their own leadership abilities.
If the new U.S. president can learn from Abraham Lincoln so too can business leaders who are grappling now with similar questions of how to lead in turbulent times. To find out what the lessons from Lincoln are, HBR senior editor Diane Coutu interviewed Team of Rivals author Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian whose other books include No Ordinary Time (about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and their era), The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, and Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream.
In the course of a wide-ranging, two-hour conversation, Goodwin described the qualities that made it possible for Lincoln to “bring disgruntled opponents together to create the most unusual cabinet in history,” offered some advice to the new president as he confronts the current economic crisis, and expressed her belief that the United States will weather this storm as it has weathered worse before. What follows is an abridged and edited version of the interview.
What lessons can President Barack Obama and other leaders take away from studying Abraham Lincoln’s presidency?
There are several, but the first one President Obama focused on in discussions during the election campaign concerns the way Lincoln surrounded himself with people, including his rivals, who had strong egos and high ambitions; who felt free to question his authority; and who were unafraid to argue with him.
For example, Lincoln brought Salmon Chase into his cabinet as treasury secretary and kept him there for three years, knowing full well that Chase craved the presidency with every fiber of his being and knowing that Chase was undermining him all the time with cabinet members, Congress, and the rest of the country. So long as he was doing a good job at his post, that was more important than personal feelings. Obama is obviously trying to do the same thing by choosing his chief rival, Hillary Clinton, to be secretary of state; by picking rival Joe Biden as his vice president; and by including powerful Republicans in his cabinet like Robert Gates and Ray LaHood.
But you have to remember, the idea is not just to put your rivals in power—the point is that you must choose the best and most able people in the country, for the good of the country. Lincoln came to power when the nation was in peril, and he had the intelligence, and the self-confidence, to know that he needed the best people by his side, people who were leaders in their own right and who were very aware of their own strengths. That’s an important insight whether you’re the leader of a country or the CEO of a company.