LEAD AND SUCCEED

For the author, whose 50-year academic career included a 16-year tenure as Tulane University’s president, “every teachable moment on my journey not only made me a better leader but also equipped me with the skills and qualities that I needed to cope with the unimaginable crisis that would end up defining the rest of my career: Hurricane Katrina.” In 10 conversational chapters, Cowen shares his own experiences and challenges (including his dyslexia, which remained undiagnosed until his early 20s) in the context of discussing precepts to “help you become the resilient, adaptive leader you need to be in a world of constant crises.” These include: stepping up and earning the respect of others (such as when he remained alongside staff and faculty who rode out Katrina on campus); cultivating mentors and mavericks in your advisory mix (a mentor gave Cowen a surprising yet critical push to leave an early limiting teaching job), and, most critically, “mobilizing people to accept the ‘new normal’ and focus on the silver linings” (in Cowen’s case, adding a public service requirement to Tulane’s curriculum following Katrina). Each chapter ends with “reflection” and “action” prompts to apply the author’s ideas in developing one’s own leadership capabilities. An esteemed educator who also served as interim president at Case Western during the Covid-19 pandemic, Cowen here is an appealingly down-to-earth Socratic sage guiding his target audience in assessing their own capacity for leadership. While most topics covered will likely be familiar to leadership guide readers, Cowen’s section on “adaptive leadership,” the focus of a course that he developed at Tulane, is particularly compelling—its six outlined principles (including “ensure inclusive, innovative, and thorough solution-finding”) are guideposts that any aspiring leader would do well to follow.