Lincoln On Leadership: Executive Strategies for Tough Times

by Donald T. Phillips

Studies of other well-known leaders suggest that certain factors in childhood can predispose a person to great leadership. James MacGregor Burns pointed out, for example, that the most important influences on the shaping of leaders lie “almost wholly in their early years.” He observed that Gandhi, Lenin, and Franklin Roosevelt appeared to have “a strong attachment to one parent coupled with some intensively negative attachment to the other.” Most of these leaders had a close relationship with their mothers, who appeared to favor them over other siblings. Sigmund Freud made a similar observation when, in The Interpretation of Dreams, he wrote, “I have found that people who know that they are preferred or favoured by their mother[s] give evidence in their lives of a peculiar self-reliance and an unshakable optimism which often seem like heroic attributes and bring actual success to their possessors.”