Time to Lead: Lessons for Today’s Leaders from Bold Decisions that Changed History

Where is leadership when we need it? What can today&;s corporate, non-profit, military, and public-service leaders learn from daring decisions that changed history?

In Time to Lead, Jan-Benedict Steenkamp presents a fresh examination of history-making leaders by holding a magnifying glass up to a life-changing dilemma each of them faced. What we learn is how powerful the personalities of leaders and their decision-making processes can be in determining the course of human events&;and the fates of millions of people.

Steenkamp explains how these great men and women arrived at the solutions to the problems they confronted by virtue of their character traits and whether they were foxes or hedgehogs&;as in the ancient parable&;or, as he further categorizes, eagles or ostriches.

Sixteen carefully curated case studies hold powerful lessons that today&;s leaders can apply in their own professional lives. Readers will recognize Roosevelt, Washington, Mandela, Thatcher, Alexander the Great, and MLK, but other lesser-known leaders, such as Themistocles, Clovis, Peter, Fisher, and Nightingale provide equally valuable insights into how individuals make decisions based upon one of seven leadership styles (adaptive, persuasive, directive, disruptive, authentic, servant, and charismatic) and four personality classifications (hedgehog, fox, eagle, or ostrich).

Steenkamp&;s assessment tools provide seasoned and aspiring leaders alike with the means to not only determine their own individual styles, but how to step up when they inevitably come face-to-face with their own moments of truth.

Chapter takeaways, leadership principles, and open-ended, reflective questions will confer encouragement, enrichment, and empowerment on readers when they realize they can utilize the same tactics as these leaders in their own lives.

Time to Lead is about great men and women, their actions in leadership that have withstood the test of time, what we can learn from them&;and the lessons that are relevant for us here and now.

Jan-Benedict Steenkamp (Dr. honoris causa; PhD, MSc, BSc [all summa cum laude]) is C. Knox Massey Distinguished Professor of Marketing at the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School. He is an Honorary Professor at the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management, Fellow of the European Marketing Academy, Chairman of the International Board of Experts at the Institute for Nation(al) Branding (Shanghai), and Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Growth at Fudan University (Shanghai). He is a member of the selection committee of the Spinoza Prize, nicknamed the Dutch Nobel Prize. He is co-founder and Executive Director of the Institute AiMark.

Since his days as an undergraduate student at Wageningen University, the Netherlands (1977-1981), he has held a variety of leadership positions at four universities in three countries, at professional organizations, non-profits, research councils, and a political party. Most recently, he was Chairman of the Marketing Area at the Kenan-Flagler Business School from 2006-2018, during which time the department's global ranking improved from #24 to #7.

A prolific writer, he is the author of five books and over one hundred articles that have appeared in leading marketing and management journals and leading practitioner journals such as Harvard Business Review, Management and Business Review, and Long Range Planning. He has written a dozen case studies, including three  on the role of inspired leadership in company success, all of which are available through The Case Centre. His work has received over 50,000 citations, and he has a Hirsch-Index of 80.

He has taught, consulted, and given executive seminars on all continents and to a multitude of organizations including the US Military Academy at West Point. His work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Economist, The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, newspapers in China, Europe, India, and South Korea, and he has been interviewed on television in the US, China, Europe, South Africa, and India. 

A naturalized Dutch-American, he has taught at universities in Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, China, India, Spain, South Africa, the UK, and the US. He was  recognized as "Teaching All Star" by UNC's MBA program. 

In 2005, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences awarded him the Muller lifetime prize for exceptional achievements in the area of the behavioral and social sciences. His award was the first time the prize has been granted to an academic in any area of business administration. He also received an honorary doctorate from Aarhus University (Denmark) and lifetime achievement honors from the American Marketing Association (twice) and the European Marketing Academy.