The Leadership Moment: Nine True Stories of Triumph and Disaster and Their Lessons for Us All

Are you ready for the leadership moment?brbrMerck's Roy Vagelos commits millions of dollars to develop a drug needed only by people who can't afford it · Eugene Kranz struggles to bring the Apollo 13 astronauts home after an explosion rips through their spacecraft · Arlene Blum organizes the first women's ascent of one of the world's most dangerous mountains · Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain leads his tattered troops into a pivotal Civil War battle at Little Round Top · John Gutfreund loses Salomon Brothers when his inattention to a trading scandal almost topples the Wall Street giant · Clifton Wharton restructures a $50 billion pension system direly out of touch with its customers · Alfredo Cristiani transforms El Salvador's decade-long civil war into a negotiated settlement · Nancy Barry leads Women's World Banking in the fight against Third World poverty · Wagner Dodge faces the decision of a lifetime as a fast-moving forest fire overtakes his firefighting crew

To prove their various points, most books on business leadership focus strictly on either a series of standard, contemporary corporate illustrations or a single nontraditional model (such as a specific historic personality or a classic manuscript such as the ITao Te Ching/I). But Michael Useem, director of the Center for Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, has long used poignant real-life examples of people facing their "moments of truth"--regardless of the setting--to teach students how best to perform under the pressures they will face in the business world. In iThe Leadership Moment: Nine True Stories of Triumph and Disaster and Their Lessons for Us All/i, Useem presents some of these surprisingly effective profiles to show how others have responded when push truly comes to shove. Among them are: the story of Roy Vagelos championing an unprofitable drug that ultimately wiped out a debilitating disease in Africa; how flight director Eugene Kranz worked calmly and efficiently to return the endangered Apollo 13 astronauts safely back to Earth; and a look at Arlene Blum's pioneering all-woman ascent of the 26,545-foot Himalayan peak Annapurna in 1978. I--Howard Rothman/I