https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/book-review-leaders-myth-and-reality-stanley-mcchrystal/
In the new Leaders: Myth and Reality, history outshines theory despite the best efforts of McChrystal and his co-authors.
Leadership is the religion of America’s ambitious. Middle managers, hedge-fund executives, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs alike make pilgrimage to conferences and peruse the bestselling breviaries on the subject. This month, high-school seniors who submitted college applications await judgment from admissions committees evaluating their “leadership experience.”
This societal obsession is not new. During the 19th century, sales of Plutarch’s Lives — the classic second-century study of great men — trailed only those of the Bible. And for all its misuse as a concept, leadership remains a desirable skill today, especially in wartime, for reasons Plutarch understood well. Describing the life of the Greek general Eumenes, he wrote: “As soon as the soldiers saw him they saluted him in their Macedonian dialect, and took up their shields, and striking them with their pikes, gave a great shout; inviting the enemy to come on, for now they had a leader.”
Few Americans today have led troops into battle. Fewer still have fought in multiple wars. During his 35-year career, U.S. Army general Stanley McChrystal led multinational forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, earning multiple times three medals — the Defense Distinguished Service Medal (twice), the Defense Superior Service Medal (twice), and the Legion of Merit (thrice) — that most soldiers never once receive. Four decades after he began fighting America’s wars, he remains active in American public life. He runs a leadership-advisory firm, frequents cable talk shows, teaches at Yale, and publishes books. In his latest, Leaders: Myth and Reality, he and coauthors Jason Mangone and Jeff Eggers turn to the study of leadership.
With Mangone and Eggers, themselves veterans (of the Marine Corps and Navy, respectively), McChrystal takes up the study of 13 deceased leaders. Adopting Plutarch’s style, they pair leaders for comparison: Maximilien Robespierre and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi are the Zealots, Martin Luther and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are the Reformers, and so on.