Some business and leadership lessons from Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson
Temperament is the great separator. Four days after FDR took the presidential oath in 1933, he visited former Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was celebrating his 92nd birthday. After that visit, Holmes described Roosevelt as having, “A second-class intellect. But a first-class temperament.”Intelligence is important but it’s useless if not paired with the correct temperament.
Strong opinions, weakly held. When his formal education was cut short at age 9, Abraham Lincoln was forced to educate himself.It was through this self-education that Lincoln developed an open mind. He pledged to his constituents early on in his political career that if his opinions on a subject later turned out to be wrong he was more than “ready to renounce them.” Honest Abe had the rare ability to acknowledge his errors and learn from his mistakes.