NOTE: I REGRET THE INTERMITTENT INTERRUPTIONS IN THIS SERIES. BLAME THE LACK OF TIME – AND ALL THOSE OTHER INDIVIDUALS AND ISSUES ON WHICH I CHOOSE, IN VARIOUS VENUES, TO COMMENT. BUT AS YOU SEE, THE VERY SHORT COURSE CONTINUES.
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As indicated in my post of August 21, 2025, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the earlier post for how “classic” is defined.)
The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they will prompt you to dig deeper.
The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.
Today’s leadership literacy classic is in Part II of the book, Literature as Leadership. The idea that writing can be an act of leadership at first seems astonishing. But it is not, or it should not be. After all, writing is communicating. It is using words to send a message, in this case about change. Specifically, every writer in this section of the book was a leader. An intellectual leader who sought to create change by so convincingly making their case that people would feel compelled to act.
The eight men and four women who fall into this category all set out to right what they deeply believed was a wrong. Remarkably they did. Moreover, they wrote so well that we read them still.
Today’s writer as leader – or, if you prefer, leader as writer – is Rachel Carson. She is appropriate to write about on Memorial Day 2026 maybe not in the conventional sense – but certainly in the larger one. Carson was a great American who fought tirelessly for her country, for those who then peopled it, and for the generations of Americans yet to be born. For she was among the angriest – and most influential – environmentalists ever. Carson was angry at all the soiling and spoiling of the air we breathed, and the water we drank, and she was angry at the harm being done, some of it irreparable, to irreplaceable flora and fauna.
To her anger she harnessed her formidable powers – two in particular. First, she was an expert. As I wrote in Leadership: Essential Selections, “this was no mealymouthed, ladylike lady, shedding wasted tears over the loss of what once had been.” No, this woman was, atypically in the 1950s and 60’s, a highly trained scientist (marine biologist) who marshalled her great knowledge on behalf of her great cause.
Second, Carson wielded her pen with the power and passion of a poet. Her gorgeous yet harrowing descriptions of what had already been lost, and her frightening depictions of destructions yet to come, were impossible to deny. As to many – though tragically not to all – they were impossible to resist.
While her immediate concern was over the indiscriminate and reckless use of synthetic chemical pesticides (especially DDT), her worries and warnings were much more expansive. Hence her classic, her contribution to the great leadership literature, Silent Spring.
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Excerpt from Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)
There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checker-board of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where in the spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half-hidden in the mists of the fall mornings….
Then a strange blight crept over the area, and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families…. There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths not only among adults but even among children, who would be stricken suddenly while at play and die within a few hours.
There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example – where had they gone? …. On the farms the hens brooded but no chicks hatched…. The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire…. Even the streams were now lifeless….