Leadership and Character…

In times when there is no dearth of prescriptive literature on leadership’s skills and rules and what not, I read this thought-provoking piece…

“Why was Lincoln so great that he over-shadows all other national heroes? He really was not a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skillful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but the supremacy expresses itself altogther in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character.

– Leo Tolstoy, quoted in The World, New York, February 7, 1908

 What do you think?