Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Quiet Leader Presidents Rank Highly

My leadership study this past week found me pausing on a recent post on Michael McKinney's Leadership Now blog. What Makes a President Great was an terrific post where I encountered new leadership insight through Michael's review of the book The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn't): Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game.

In the book, author Alvin S. Felzenberg devises new criteria and standards for ranking our former presidents. As Felzenberg described in an interview on National Review Online,
What I attempt to do in my book is to provide six criteria and assign each president a grade in each — just as educators do students on report cards. My categories are: character; vision; competence; management of the economy; handling of national security, defense, and foreign policy; and whether they extended or restricted liberty, especially at home.

As I read the Leadership Now post and reviewed the ranking of Felzenberg's top presidents, I was ecstatic to find three Quiet Leader "Hall of Fame" selections in the top 12 list. The Quiet Leader "Hall of Fame" represents my personal choices of quiet leaders who achieve greatness while exhibiting quiet leader attributes including humility, vision, balance, learning, and quiet purpose. The Quiet Leader "Hall of Fame" includes these top 12 presidents:

Rank

President/ Hall of Fame Selection

1

Abraham Lincoln

5

Dwight D Eisenhower

8

Ulysses S. Grant



A fourth president, Harry S. Truman, is ranked number 10 on the list and his nomination to the Quiet Leader Hall of Fame is currently under consideration.

Bottom line: Our quiet leader presidents rank highly and this causes me to reconsider,
In this age, could a Quiet Leader be elected president?

Read the Leadership Now post. It's very insightful in this presidential election time.

Thanks for reading. Please lead quietly and be presidentially humble.
Don

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