#373： The Leader's Bookshelf
Episode Stats
Summary
It s been said leaders are readers, but what should a leader read? My guest today set out to answer that question by pulling four-star generals and admirals in the U.S. military to get their best recommendations.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast it's been said
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leaders are readers but what should a leader read my guest today set out to answer that question by
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pulling four-star generals and admirals in the u.s military to get their best recommendations
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his name is admiral james stavridis he served as the commander of u.s southern command u.s european
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command and nato supreme allied commander europe he now serves as dean of the fletcher school of law
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and diplomacy at tufts university in his book the leader's bookshelf admiral stavridis explains why
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reading is fundamental for all leaders and provides a list of 50 books suggested by senior officers we
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begin our conversation today by discussing the culture of reading amongst military officers
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past and present including general james mattis and george patten admiral stavridis then shares
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tips on how to read more even with the busy schedule and how to get more out of your reading
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we then dig into the list of 50 books military brass recommend the most and the lessons on
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leadership they provide you're going to be adding a lot of books to your reading list after listening
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this podcast so take notes after the show's over check out our show notes at aom.is slash leaders
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bookshelf all right admiral james stavridis welcome to the show great to be with you brett so you wrote
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a book co-authored a book called the leader's bookshelf obviously said you're you're an admiral
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in the navy i'm curious what was the genesis of this book the book grew out of a love of books
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and the way it tactically occurred was that i had completed four years as the supreme allied
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commander of nato and my publisher random house asked me to do a memoir so i did it's called the
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accidental admiral and then they came to me and said okay admiral now would like you to write a
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leadership book and as you know brett the world is awash in leadership books there are far too many
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of them and so what i thought i would try and do instead of writing yet another hands on hips
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then i told the president to launch the tomahawks kind of book i thought why not take my love of books
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and pour it into a single volume that tries to cut through this thicket of books that make you a
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better leader and hence uh i found a co-author and the two of us worked together uh for a couple of
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years finding books that we thought helped people become better leaders and that is the genesis of
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the leader's bookshelf and the way you went about finding these books is you asked other officers in
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the military what their most influential book on leadership that they read and what i was amazed is
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like the breadth of the the authors you reached out to and the the diversity of books i mean would
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you say there's a culture of reading amongst military officers in the united states or even in
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just the world oh absolutely absolutely so think of general jim mattis who's currently the secretary of
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defense when he and i were working in the pentagon together over a decade ago he was a one-star
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officer he's a bit older than i am i was a navy captain but we became very close friends and
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exchanged book ideas constantly in fact if you flip over the leader's bookshelf you'll see a very nice
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blurb from general jim mattis i think general mattis owns somewhere around 4 000 books my own library is
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probably 5 000 books general john kelly the current chief of staff in the white house inveterate reader and
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there are two reasons for that one is that as a military officer you actually end up with a
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surprising amount of time to read on airplanes as you're waiting to go on an operation as you're
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on a ship in the case of a navy admiral like me sailing home from the pacific there's actually as the
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saying goes about war it's a hurry up but wait business and there's a lot of waiting so so there is
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time in a military career to read and secondly i would say because our business is so serious
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that of war that you need chances to step outside it to refresh yourself in every dimension from
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fiction to non-fiction to geography to history to politics and all of those kinds of books are
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represented in the leader's bookshelf and this culture of reading amongst military officers goes
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back even decades i mean you highlight george patten which a lot of people wouldn't think
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based on the reputation he's has as being a sort of scholar and thinker and reader but old blood and
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guts that guy read you know prolifically oh indeed and all of those uh world war ii generals and admirals were
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enormously well read and and as i did more research for this book i kept tripping over various sites
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where you can look at the the library the titles in the library of george marshall for example these
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are officers and many of them that world war ii generation don't forget didn't grow up watching
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television because there really wasn't much television so they they came out of a culture of
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of reading and i think that's very much alive in the military today i'll give you one other example
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of it each of the service chiefs so the chief of naval operations who leads the navy the chief of staff of
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the army who leads the army each of them publish lists of books that they think are useful and
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oriented toward the service particularly again leaders bookshelf is an attempt to cut across all
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of the services and really about cutting across all dimensions of leadership it's not a book for the
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military it's a book for anyone who seeks to lead others and why do you think reading is so
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fundamental for leaders no matter what where they're leading next there's that saying that
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i've heard before you know leaders are readers why why is that i'll give you three reasons the first is
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we only get one lifetime right but by reading you get to dip into dozens and dozens and dozens of
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other lives and so whenever you're reading you're tapping into other experiences that you can bring
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to leadership secondly reading refreshes the mind it is a chance to be intimate with yourself and an
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author and it gives you a chance to be away from that mindless daily 24-hour visual news cycle
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and to really contemplate you should almost think of it as exercise for the mind and then thirdly it's
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fun it's entertaining it's a it's a great hobby to be able to pick up a book and jump back 200 years
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in history and suddenly you're sailing at sea with lord nelson at the battle of trafalgar so i think for
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those three reasons leaders tend to be readers so before we get into some of the books that are
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highlighted in the leaders bookshelf you have these great chapters on how to read more how to get more
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out of your reading i'd love to get your insights into this because now you're also a college dean
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correct i am i'm the dean of the fletcher school of law and diplomacy at tufts university where i did
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my own phd back in my 20s the navy took me off five years of sea duty and sent me here i was a good
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mariner and i could launch a tomahawk missile but in those days i couldn't launch an idea to save my
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life and graduate school here at the fletcher school shaped me and it made me very hungry to come
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back and give back to this institution which is what i've done by becoming the dean so yeah let me say
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a word about first finding time to read and there are little tricks of the trade that serious readers
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follow one i think today is pretty obvious and it's using technology and that is instead of hauling
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around four or five books you take your kindle or i read very effectively on my iphone it's just
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adapting yourself to using the electronic means we have available makes you a much more efficient
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reader secondly finding time in the course of the day to read in little chunks and and this relates
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to the first point which is that when you've got your electronic device with you that previously
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dead 10 minutes waiting for a bus or jumping in or out of an airport standing in the tsa security line
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everybody's favorite activity read thirdly i think it's uh very effective to record what you've read
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and i i would advocate having a small journal of reading that you're doing you can maintain that
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electronically on the same device but keep track of the books you're reading i at the end of the year
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i like to total them up i like to go back and read the notes i've taken and that brings me to a fourth
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thing which is underlining and highlighting and marginalia now you can do this electronically or you
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can do it on a paper copy of a book but force yourself to really interact with that book don't don't
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skim through it and then fifth and finally not all books are great books brett and so if you start a book
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and you're not enjoying it or not getting out of it what you'd hope to quit move on to a different book
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so often people say to themselves okay i'm gonna read dostoyevsky and then they start reading
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the brothers karamazov and they realize they hate dostoyevsky
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and yet they they slug through it painfully it becomes like scourging yourself in the middle ages
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recognize that there are endless books and endless choices and don't be afraid to stop
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if a book isn't working for you so there's five thoughts to make you a better reader that's great
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and and your personal reading habits are you reading multiple books at the same time and sort
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of switching between them i do although i do limit myself to two and as you might expect typically i'll
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have one book of fiction going and one book of non-fiction going and i find that just is a way to
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kind of refresh and step away from a particular scene and i find when i come back to a book after taking
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a break to look at another book i often come with fresh insight fresh ideas and two however i think is
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what works for me i do know some people that will juggle more than that my wife for example
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but two strikes me for a serious reader about the right number and speaking of taking notes
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the other sort of interesting tidbit about general patent was that he would type out on note cards
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his notes and i thought that was interesting indeed and i know a number of people who take
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the note taking piece of this to very high levels and have a file folder either electronic or paper on each
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book i don't quite go that far but i do rely on the notes that i've taken to lead me back
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and if i'm doing research for example right now brett i'm working on a book about character you know
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leadership is exerting influence over others character is leading yourself it's character i always
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say is what you do when you think no one is looking and so i've been reading a lot of biography of
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various individuals and um so as distinct from just if you will casual day-to-day reading when i'm
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reading for a project and reading for research then i'm taking very meticulous notes so i can get
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back to sections as i drive them into the book i'm working on next so let's get to these 50 books that
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you highlight sure in the book so when you went out and talked to these different officers in the
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military what their recommendations were and you got the results back what were you most surprised
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by in the recommendations i was pleasantly surprised at the number of novels the amount of fiction in the
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list i was secondly very happy to see some classics of memoir for example ulysses s grant's personal
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memoirs perhaps the most brilliant introspective book about character that i've come across so seeing a lot
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of not a lot but but seeing representative memoirs biography and autobiography very gratifying and
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then you see quite a bit of the history that you would sort of expect and i was also happy to see very
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few if you will classic how-to books very few leadership books like you see in an airport these were
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really i think very classic books that challenge the reader and deepen the reader and sharpen his or her
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leadership skills as a result yeah i was surprised too by the number of fiction books on the bookshelf
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i mean what were some of the examples that were on the the recommendation list well the number one book
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mentioned by multiple four-star admirals and generals and that that's who we crowdsource this with these are
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all four-star admirals and generals so by definition people who have led big organizations been highly
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successful at it and as we found are almost universally very strong readers the number one book mentioned
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most was a novel killer angels by michael shara which is about the civil war particularly about the battle
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of gettysburg and what i love about it is that it it shows you that there are so many different kinds
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of leadership that can be exercised think of the distinction brett between the cerebral almost
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cosmic robert e lee and the intense impetuosity of pickett leading pickett's charge across that
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battlefield two totally different leaders but both of them have a style of leadership i think another
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fantastic novel it's really a set of novels is patrick o'brien's sea novels some of the listeners may
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have seen the film master and commander with russell crowe and that film is quite good and it's a
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reflection of the first novel in a series of 20 novels about the napoleonic wars which are just
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brilliant and then a last novel to mention because it's so different than the other two
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is a harper lee's classic to kill a mockingbird which of course is about integrity and uh there are
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other novels on the list but those are three that really leap out at me is what do you think that
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you can get out of a fiction book you know these lessons on leadership that you can't say from a
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you know one of those typical leadership books you get at the airport first and foremost in a a work
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of fiction you get to step into another time and place and and here particularly historical fiction
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is incredibly powerful pick up stephen pressfield's gates of fire about the battle of thermopoli
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where the 300 spartans led by leonatus are fighting the persians to pick up that novel is to step into
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that desperate battle and to to feel with your bones the challenges of leading 300 spartans in what
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they know will be their last mission they won't come back they know that how do you lead men in that
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setting or back to to kill a mockingbird putting yourself in the footsteps of atticus finch small
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town lawyer in the deep south who defends an african-american and and endures all that comes
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from doing so so first and foremost with the novel is you get to jump into another time and place secondly
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brett you can say to yourself well what would i do in that setting it's almost like a simulator of
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leadership where you can think about how you would deal with the challenges here a good example would
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be a connecticut yankee in king arthur's court by mark twain where an engineer goes back in time a
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thousand years by definition he's the smartest person on the planet earth he knows everything
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because he's got a thousand years of knowledge that he's taken back with him but nobody believes him
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he's got a leadership challenge so how do you convince that very distant world to come along with you
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and you put yourself in those positions and then secondly i i think books novels that are historical
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fiction give you an enormous sense of history which is very helpful to leaders it actually
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didn't make the top 50 but a book that is often mentioned a series of books are the
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flashman series by george mcdonald fraser about a british army officer in the 19th century
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they're highly entertaining but they're also extraordinary little gems of history flashman
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ends up at the the indian sepoy mutiny he ends up at the charge of the light brigade he's at the
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battle of little bighorn and these are meticulously researched great deal of history comes out of that so
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i'd say for those two reasons novels have a unique value that go above and beyond a work of non-fiction
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yeah i can attest to the historical fiction being a great way to learning history because
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once it's put in a narrative form like you're more likely to remember it that's how i know about
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the gettysburg battle of gettysburg is killer angels yeah it's a fabulous book another novel
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that was very high on our list is called once an eagle by anton myrer and that's a novel about
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vietnam and to understand vietnam in the psychology of the army in vietnam that novel uh once an eagle
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is highly highly recommended yeah my father-in-law enjoys that book and he actually just lent me the
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copy of that and i saw it on the list i'm like all right i got it's a sign i need to read this book
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now you'll enjoy it so as you said earlier biographies memoirs make up a big portion of the
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list what were some of the you mentioned ulysses grant his memoirs the best yeah that's a memoir
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and this is a kind of a tragic personal story so grant has finished up his presidency which was
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rocked by corruption scandals toward the end and then he contracts throat cancer and he knows that
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his wife will be destitute because he's been in public service his whole life he's never made any
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money and despite the whiff of scandal he never profited personally at all and so he was essentially
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penniless but he was able to secure a contract and so as he's dying of throat cancer he writes these
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memoirs and they're just gorgeously written they they take you through his life and career and they're
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deeply deeply deeply personal and i think shaded by the fact that he knows his own end is coming
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it's a it's a beautiful read and it also is full of lessons for uh how to how to lead truly big
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organizations and really how to be the president of the united states was there another biography that
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you saw get recommended over and over again or memoir yeah i think we saw many many recommendations
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that came in for a book called team of rivals by doris kearns goodwin which is
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less a memoir it's it's actually a work of history looking at lincoln's cabinet but its powerful
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story is that of creating uh teams and building teams and in in doing so doris kearns goodwin tells
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the story of all the senior members of lincoln's cabinet that was just a beautifully realized book
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about people and leadership are there any military strategy books on the list that you think civilian
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leaders might get something out of if they read it i i think the classic there is uh the art of war by
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sun tzu and sun tzu was an ancient philosopher warrior who tells the the story of of how to be
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in challenging situations and it's not a a book about how to line up military formations the way say
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closet wits is on war is the art of war is really about being clever the greatest battle you ever win
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is the one you never actually fight it's about deception it's about causing your enemy to to be off
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balance i think there are enormous lessons for people in really all walks of life
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from sun tzu as a as a military writer on war i would not recommend for the common reader that's a
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classic prussian how to put your war fighting staff together much less of the right kind of things
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in terms of a a book that has a lot of military but i think transcends that is is a book by sir john
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keegan called the mask of command which examines different leaders under very stressful circumstances
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who are going into battle and the lessons that keegan draws out of that i think are very applicable
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to everything from your family situation you know you're a leader bred in your family so is your wife
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i'm sure but you you have to also use those lessons across the world of business interestingly in keegan's book
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he looks at the duke of wellington who won at waterloo he looks at ulysses s grant he looks and
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this may surprise you but he looks at adolf hitler how is hitler so successful he calls him the false
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hero but it's a very very competently done book that brings military strategy to uh to the reader in
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a way that would apply for anybody so you mentioned uh you were pleasantly surprised by the the dearth of
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leadership you know quote unquote leadership books but did did some make the list and do you think
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they deserve to be there i do one that i i think is a very good book and and sort of created a almost
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a cult industry is the seven habits of highly effective people by steve covey and it's a very
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practical book in in those leadership books i like practical and i think that covey talks about
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how you build trust how you organize your day how you reward others it's it's a very functional kind
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of book and that made it and then i i think just a very interesting kind of crossover book is written
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by an an old-time uh chief staff of the army the leader of the u.s army a guy named gordon sullivan
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and the book the book has a great title it's hope is not a method what business leaders can learn
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from america's army and that one i think is a kind of classic leadership book but it's very
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sensibly written and really picks up this theme that we've talked about here today
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of what can civilians take away from military style leadership so now most of the leaders as you said
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the cohort were older because they're four-star generals or admirals right so they're going to be
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what in their 40s and 50s 60s um probably in their 50s as as four-star officers they'll be in
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their early to mid 50s typically so uh did you ask any younger officers what they're reading and if so
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how does it differ from the older officers we we absolutely did and one of the chapters in the book
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is exactly that it's called what are young leaders reading and you know as you'd expect there are some
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pretty significant differences between what the uh the more senior leaders read and what younger
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leaders read and i'll give you a couple examples of books that made the young leaders list that i think
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probably didn't have a good chance at making the senior list but then i'll tell you some books that
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were on both lists so memoir as opposed to uh ulysses s grant the memoir that we heard a lot about was
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by robert gates his book duty he was of course former secretary of defense and director of the cia
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in terms of history we saw a book by max boot called invisible armies which is about special forces which
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again is something you would expect from junior officers we saw the new digital age by eric schmidt
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the head of google we saw thinking fast and slow by daniel kyneman we saw the road to character by
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david brooks so none of those were on the senior list because you know the senior folks are maybe a
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little bit less oriented toward that kind of tech world if you will and then on the junior officer
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list there were some truly quirky outliers a book called infinite jest by david foster wallace
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atlas shrugged by ann rand i think the secret agent by joseph conrad was on the list let me tell you
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three books that made both lists and and you mentioned brett that you'd read one of them and
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it's killer angels was on both lists the battle of gettysburg the book i talked about a minute ago
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gates of fire was on both lists master and commander about that 19th century sea captain the napoleonic
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wars was on the list so there were a handful of books that made both lists but as you would expect
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and you would kind of hope because you hope a new generation is coming along with new ideas
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the younger leaders had different books and that's the beauty of the leader's bookshelf the book you
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get it you get a look at both so besides this list of books recommended by military leaders there's
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there's lots of lists in the military there's like a culture like you said there's this culture of
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reading and there's also this culture of reading lists in the military why do you think lists are a
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powerful tool in directing or you know in improving your reading first because they help you organize
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gives second because it gives you a goal you can say maybe i'm not going to read every book on this
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list but i'm going to read 10 of the books on this list this year thirdly it's a list that has been
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curated it's been selected by people who have read a lot fourthly it's probably been crowdsourced just
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like our book is crowdsourced among senior four-star officers all of those lists are crowdsourced out to
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groups of people both the junior and senior people and fifth and finally because of the ability to
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take a title and pop it into google you can read reviews of the book you can read a summary of the
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book one of the things we include in the leader's bookshelf as you know is a short summary of the book
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and then we try and extract those leadership lessons from each of the books so i think for all
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those reasons lists make a lot of sense and then let's face it the military is nothing if not
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organized we're famous for our checklists if you want to land an airplane in the military you're
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going to go right down a checklist if you're going to take a submarine and take it down to depth you're
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going to work off a checklist if you're going to launch a missile you're going to work off a checklist
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so military people are used to working off lists and i think frankly so are a lot of civilians they're
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organized and and it's a good way to put structure in reading is there any place people can go to see
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some of these lists or they just need to google if you google department of defense reading lists you
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will see many of these pop up and uh i would caution the general listener that many of them are very
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specific to the command in other words if you look at the chief staff of the army's reading list it's
00:28:06.600
going to be really army heavy same with navy same with air force if you look at the reading list for
00:28:12.600
the commander of u.s southern command which is everything south of the united states i held that
00:28:18.000
position before i was the supreme allied commander over in nato and my reading list there had an awful lot
00:28:23.880
of titles about latin america and the caribbean south america so just be mindful that those reading
00:28:30.140
lists are going to be pretty specialized and that was part of why we wanted to do the leader's bookshelf
00:28:36.120
to generate something that was very broadly based not tied to a particular service or a particular
00:28:42.360
geographic area or a particular time frame but was something that could be very approachable for the
00:28:48.420
general reader so as you put together this this book list and you were organizing your book the leader's
00:28:54.760
bookshelf what were the big leadership lessons that you kept seeing over and over again and all the books
00:29:01.560
that people recommended yeah number one is good leaders are good communicators and you see that again
00:29:09.740
and again in in everyone from an abraham lincoln to ulysses s grant to napoleon to winston
00:29:17.680
churchill good leaders have to be able to communicate and you can pick up a lot of tips on how to do that
00:29:24.300
by reading the books in the reader's bookshelf secondly good leaders build teams we mentioned doris
00:29:29.540
kearns goodwin in the team of rivals good leaders aren't afraid to have very talented people who aren't
00:29:36.020
always in agreement working for them old saying brett is that a quality people hire a quality people
00:29:43.240
b quality people hire c quality people why because they're threatened by those very talented individuals
00:29:51.720
truly great leaders build a teams and here i'd look at the book truman by david mccullough to look at how
00:29:59.620
president truman built his team as well as the book i mentioned earlier about lincoln's cabinet
00:30:05.260
and then thirdly again and again you see that leaders are innovators leaders want to try new
00:30:13.140
things and you see that in the fiction connecticut yankee and king arthur's core that's all about
00:30:18.040
invention and innovation you see it in memoirs dwight eisenhower's crusade in europe how he turned the
00:30:26.160
strategic issues on their head in terms of decisions about where he would take things on
00:30:32.000
ender's game which is a science fiction novel about cyber war it's all about innovation invention and
00:30:39.840
ideas i'd say those three things kept coming back again and again and then in every single book on
00:30:46.820
the list you hit the the need for integrity the need for character again that's why my current book
00:30:53.720
project which will be out uh in 19 in about a year is about character the voyage of character is what i'm
00:31:01.320
calling it and i think every one of these 50 books talks about the need to be truthful to have
00:31:07.420
integrity to be civil the qualities of character that we ought to admire the most and and sadly are
00:31:14.480
not always in evidence in today's leaders i must say well we'll have to have you come back on the show
00:31:19.700
when your new book comes out admiral james this has been a great conversation thank you so much for
00:31:24.820
your time it's been a pleasure been my pleasure brett and happy reading thank you my guest it was admiral
00:31:29.700
james devridis he is the author of the book the leader's bookshelf it's available on amazon.com and
00:31:34.400
bookstores everywhere and if you want to learn more about his book and his work in our show notes with
00:31:38.920
links to all the books that he mentioned head over to our show notes at aom.is slash leaders bookshelf
00:31:44.260
well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice
00:32:00.440
make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com if you enjoy the
00:32:04.060
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00:32:06.920
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00:32:10.680
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00:32:15.120
always thank you for your continued support until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay