Like tour guides of ancient Rome, historians have the rare quality of looking back to pluck a few key events to tell a meaningful story to the broadest audience.
Biographer and historian Talmage Boston has mastered that in his latest, How the Best Did It: Leadership Lessons From Our Top Presidents.
Practicing “applied history,” he crunched the results from his pick of the eight most influential presidents to come up with 24 leadership traits aimed at helping those in business and politics.
“It’s one thing to know history, enjoy history, but it’s something else to be able to apply history to daily living. And that’s what this book is attempting to do, give somebody who either aspires to be a leader, or is already a leader and wants to be a better leader, some really important things to think about as he or she tries to up their game as a leader going forward,” he told Secrets.
Boston, also a Dallas-based lawyer and baseball historian, said that his Mount Rushmore of presidents would include Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt.
In fact, he’d back restarting the stone carving project to include all eight. “ …