Harry S. Truman on Leadership

When the Buck Stops With You: Harry S. Truman on Leadership
by Alan Axelrod

Harry Truman had been vice president for less than a year when he inherited the White House in 1945. With little preparation, he masterfully guided the nation through the last days of World War II, the Marshall Plan, and the war in Korea. The humble, plainspoken man known for the adage "The buck stops here" took on the challenges the way he knew best-head on.

Bestselling author Alan Axelrod offers a fascinating look at the man who made some of the most difficult decisions of the last century, through more than 150 lessons from Truman's life and career. Divided among twelve chapters such as "Bringing People Together," "The Right Thing," "Hell: Giving and Getting," and "Facts of the Matter," these concise principles can be used by modern-day managers in their day-to-day quest for business success. Inspirational and practical, When the Buck Stops with You is sure to join Axelrod's other works as a must-have volume on leadership.

Do Your Damnedest

"Three things can ruin a man," Harry Truman once said, "power, money, and women. I never wanted power, I never had any money, and the only woman in my life is up at the house right now."

For once, the Man from Missouri wasn't being 100 percent honest. There was another woman in Truman's life. It was his daughter, Margaret, to whom he was devoted with a love at once intense and easygoing. He wrote her many letters over the years, including one in which he confessed, "Your dad will never be reckoned among the great." He continued:

But you can be sure he did his level best and gave all he had to his country. There is an epitaph in Boot Hill Cemetery in Tombstone, Arizona, which reads, "Here lies Jack Williams; he done his damnedest." What more can a person do?

This is a book of lessons on leadership from Harry Truman. But Truman, a lover of sharp, straight, homely words, would have called them something else: lessons on doing your damnedest.

Such lessons are not easy to come by.

We are continually tempted to do less than our damnedest and, at virtually every turn, are told to pursue the quick and dirty, advised to "work smart, not hard," and urged to take the money and run. Plug away at a job or a career long enough, and it is easy to forget who you are and of what, at your truest best, you are capable. Each day, you may drift further and further from your damnedest or, even worse, you may never even discover just what your damnedest is.

Harry Truman sacrificed much. He dedicated himself to public service. He took on all the responsibility of office, every last bit of it, and accepted all the criticism, every bitter jab. At the same time, he turned away most of the praise and the credit, deflecting it to those who loyally reported to him. But one sacrifice he would never make: to do less than his damnedest. Give up your best self, choose not to stretch, take the fast, low road - these easy alternatives were much too hard for Truman.

The facts of Harry Truman's life, including those from childhood through his pre-White House political career, are surveyed in Chapter 1, "Missouri to the White House, the White House to Missouri," and what is most striking about them is that they are hardly striking at all. Truman was an admirable but, as he himself said, a perfectly ordinary man - who nevertheless resolved to do his damnedest.

This is not a learned political study or a meditation on the nature of power. It is a hard and practical look at the leadership moments in the life and career of Harry S. Truman through the lens of his own words and the words of those with whom he dealt directly. The purpose is to distill lessons that can be applied to any situation - especially in business - that requires making definitive decisions, making difficult choices, and mastering a legion of competing priorities.

Learning from example is an enterprise Truman himself heartily approved. "If I couldn't have been a pianist," he once remarked, "I think I would have done better as a professor of history."

My debt to history is one which cannot be calculated. . . . The leader of any country . . . must know the history of not only his own country but of all other great countries, and . . . he must make the effort to apply this knowledge to the decisions that have to be made. . . .

He said: "There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know." And this he understood from a very early age. "While still a boy I could see that history had some extremely valuable lessons to teach."

The point is not that Harry Truman was a frustrated history teacher or a history buff, but that he was a history user, who searched for the practical lessons of the past, plucked them out, revolved them in his mind, and applied them to the present.

Why do this? Why look for precedent and blueprint in the past?

By "history," Truman meant no mere collection of dates and events, but the story of human decisions, the causes and effects of leadership. "Men," he said, "make history. History does not make men." To learn from history is to learn from leaders and the choices they made.

Truman believed that the lessons of history would not just help him to lead, but were essential to make him a leader. For he always said he was not a born leader, but an "ordinary man." Not that there was anything wrong with being an ordinary man. Far from it. "I am sure that right down in your heart you know that the ordinary man is the backbone of the country," he once told an audience of farmers. But like so many of his generation - a generation, FDR famously observed, to which little enough had been given, but from which much was expected - Truman was an ordinary man thrust into extraordinary circumstances.

Ultimately, it is the ordinariness of Harry Truman that makes him so effective a teacher of leadership. The problems he faced - the climax of World War II, the atomic bomb, the political and moral necessity of rebuilding Europe and Asia, the economic stresses of postwar America, the Cold War, the Korean War, the urgency of civil rights - were great and to all appearances overwhelming, while he, in contrast, was, well, ordinary. If Harry Truman could find his way and take the people with him, so, it would seem, can each of us, in whatever challenging enterprise we find ourselves.

As Truman built his leadership skills largely upon a foundation of historical example, so today's managers, supervisors, and CEOs can hone theirs on the hard surface of Truman's example. It's a pity he never distilled his experience into a manual of leadership. For what working manager has the luxury of time to dive into Truman's speeches, interviews, letters, and recollections to locate the leadership pearls?

This book does that job and more, presenting Truman's key observations on the style, tactics, and strategy of leadership. Each observation is examined and discussed in its historical context and distilled into a practical, immediately usable lesson. Here is the best of Harry Truman, intended to bring out the best in us.

The text is divided into a dozen chapters. The first presents a brief biography, and the next ten approach the model of Truman's leadership thematically, with lessons on

• Defining and attaining worthwhile goals
• "Riding the tiger" - enduring, surviving, and mastering your job
• Penetrating pretense (i.e., cutting through the crap)
• Leading by example
• Giving hell - and taking it in return
• Creating consensus and common cause
• Making decisions
• Finding the facts - then using them effectively
• Creating ethical leadership
• Managing time

The last chapter, "Reckoning," presents Truman's own summary of what it takes to be a leader. A concluding Appendix offers "A Truman Timeline" and is followed by recommendations for further reading.

Read right, the life of Harry Truman is nothing less than a handbook of accountability. Truman kept on his desk the most famous motto any modern leader has ever adopted: the buck stops here. And so this book is about becoming and being a buck stopper, achieving accountability, accepting accountability, and using it creatively: making it your motto, too, by learning how to do your damnedest every time.

Copyright © 2004 Alan Axelrod. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission.

About the Author

Alan Axelrod is a renowned historian and business writer. He is the author of Nothing to Fear: Lessons in Leadership from FDR.