In Forged in Crisis, Nancy Koehn focuses on five quite different leaders who exemplify the power of courage in turbulent times: Ernest Shackleton, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Rachel Carson.

These are among her comments about Bonhoeffer:

“Despite his disdain for American theology, Bonhoeffer came to see his time in New York [while associated with Union Theological Seminary] as important. With the benefit of hindsight, we can point to two powerful lessons he absorbed there. The first was the significance of assessing one’s work in terms of its tangible consequences…

“The second lesson that Bonhoeffer took away from his time in America was the power of empathy…Bonhoeffer nourished this empathy, using it to try to understand the suffering of others — including victims of Nazi brutality. In late 1942, Bonhoeffer would define this empathy as ‘the view from below,’ the ability to see ‘the great events of world history…from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled — in short, from the perspective of those who suffer.’

“Some seventy tears later, it is essential for leaders to understand the experience of those who are falling behind economically, socially, and politically.”

Note: Bonhoeffer was condemned to death on 8 April 1945 by SS judge Otto Thorbeck at a drumhead court-martial without witnesses, records of proceedings or a defense in Flossenbürg concentration camp. He was executed there by hanging at dawn on 9 April 1945, just two weeks before soldiers from the United States 90th and 97th Infantry Divisions liberated the camp, three weeks before the Soviet capture of Berlin and a month before the surrender of Nazi Germany.

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Nancy Koehn (born 1959) is an author and a business historian at Harvard Business School in Boston, Massachusetts, where she is the James E. Robison Professor of Business Administration, and was a Visiting Scholar during 2011–2013. She is also a member of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, in the Economics Department.

Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times was published by Scribner (2017).