Leadership is easiest to praise or blame after the fact. But for those concerned with statecraft, outcomes rarely tell the whole story. The harder question is how leaders build sound judgment when information is incomplete, stakes are rising, and institutions must act across silos, time horizons, and competing pressures.

This question feels especially urgent at a moment when public life seems to be witnessing a revival in practice—if not in scholarship—of heroic, or “great man,” theories of leadership: the idea that history turns mainly on the will, intuition, or dominance of singular individuals. There is no doubt that individuals matter. The choices of presidents, diplomats, commanders, and institutional leaders can alter the course of events. But much of what we know from scholarship and practice points to a more demanding understanding of effective leadership. The best leaders do not simply project certainty or impose direction. They structure decisions, test assumptions, invite dissent, widen the circle of usable expertise, and create cultures in which responsibility is shared and bad news can travel quickly.

This is also why leadership remains so central to the work of the Kennedy School and the Belfer Center. Students come here not only to study policy, but to understand how judgment is formed, how power is exercised, and how public institutions can act with purpose amid constraint. Whether leadership can be “taught” in any simple sense is rightly debated. But its study can sharpen self-awareness, broaden historical imagination, discipline decision-making, and help future leaders recognize the habits and institutions that make better judgment possible.

The readings in this brief approach leadership in that spirit. Across history, diplomacy, military command, and contemporary statecraft, they ask not only who leads, but how leaders connect means to ends, near-term pressures to long-term interests, and personal judgment to institutional capacity. In a more contested world, the leaders who matter most will not be those who claim certainty. They will be those who can make consequential decisions without it.

Meghan L. O'Sullivan

Director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

June, 2026