Lincoln as 21st Century CEO: Problem 1: Inability to Adapt

Isn't this an intriguing question: what would Abraham Lincoln do if he were a 21st century CEO struggling to survive in a persistently sluggish economy?

Let's consider, in this and the next four blog entries, five areas of concern for any struggling company [Inability to Adapt, Lack of Team-Building Skills, Ignoring Competition, Employing "Yes Men," and Knee-Jerk Reactions] and see how Lincoln would handle each.

Problem One: Inability to Adapt

What came to be called First Bull Run took place on a balmy Sunday in July of 1861, and, hard though it may be for us at this vantage to imagine, all of Washington took picnic baskets with them in their carriages to watch the Rebels get whipped. [The assumption, North and South, was that this was going to be a quick and easy war, each side asserting that the other was no match for them!] Unfortunately, after what looked like a quick Northern victory, it was the Yankees who got whipped. At the end of the day the roads back to Washington were clogged with an odd but profoundly sobering assortment of panicky congressmen, women in their summer finery, members of the diplomatic corps and soldiers flinging their equipment to the four winds - all in headlong flight from what looked very much like abject defeat.

Total casualties, North and South, approached 5,000 that day [by comparison, this nation lost about the same number at Pearl Harbor, and on 9/11 combined]. First Bull Run, as the battle came to be called in the North, represented a national trauma of the first order. Confident Northern boasts were destined to disappear like snow in spring. A world of tranquil certitudes was over, perhaps never to return.

Understandably, the nation howled. Editorials demanded that we just let the Rebs go [“Good riddance to bad rubbish!” “They’ve been nothing but trouble anyway,” “We don’t need them!” etc].

Lincoln disagreed, calling for renewed dedication to what this country was all about. "The dogmas of the quiet past," he said, "are inadequate for the stormy present. As our situation is new so we must think anew and act anew."

And Lincoln gently but firmly [like all great leaders, neither too gentle nor too firm] kept the nation's feet to that fire. Within a few months Lincoln was giving voice to this need to adapt, focusing the nation’s attention on the reason for all the boundless, yawning pain of this war: we were experiencing “a new birth of freedom” that would insure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth” – words, like the man himself, that were carved from the granite of the great American heartland.