Page 13 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

PREFACE

with you. What an enlightening experience that would be for anyone hop-
ing to become a more effective leader.
Someone once told me that I should write the book I’d most like to
read, and the result is this volume: Leadership Lessons of the White House
Fellows. By writing it, I hoped to uncover and share the leadership lessons
the Fellows have learned from their many mentors—lessons that have laid
the foundation for many of them to assume some of the most important
leadership positions in American society. Having served as a White House
Fellow myself, I knew there was a gold mine of information out there. I
just needed to figure out how to effectively tap it and compile it in such a
way that any aspiring leader would benefit from it.
I first called upon alum Jack LeCuyer, the executive director of the
White House Fellows Foundation and Association, for help locating for-
mer Fellows. He not only provided me with the most up-to-date contact
information available, he took the initiative to communicate individually
with many of the alumni to personally encourage their participation in
the project. I then met with Janet Eissenstat, the current director of the
White House Fellows program, who was an invaluable resource on the
more recent alumni. Next, I created an eight-question survey for the Fel-
lows to complete. Among other things, I asked them to name their White
House Fellows mentor, or “principal,” and to tell me about the most pro-
found lesson they learned from that person. I also asked them to describe
some of the qualities they think are important for a leader to possess, as
well as one specific tried-and-true technique they use to inspire people to
follow them. And I asked them to disclose the most challenging leadership
experience they have ever faced and tell me how they resolved it and what
they learned from it. I e-mailed this questionnaire to each Fellow, along
with a request for a date and time to conduct an interview. In short order
the questionnaires started rolling back to me, chock full of wit, wisdom,
and priceless anecdotes.
In the meantime, I began piecing together the history of the program.
I wanted to discover why President Lyndon Johnson created the White
House Fellowships in 1964. I received a treasure trove of information and
related documents from Tom Carr, the founding director of the White
House Fellowship, who ran the program for its first five years. I also scoured
the Library of Congress and LBJ’s Presidential Library for documents and
recordings I hoped would bring the program’s earliest days to light. My

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