Historian Walter Isaacson Talks Timeless Leadership at Rudolf G. Schade Lecture

On Tuesday, April 22, Walter Isaacson, a writer, historian, former CEO of CNN and editor of Time magazine, talked to a group of students in the honors and history programs and gave a lecture on how the best leaders lead.

Isaacson talked about a range of topics, including his upbringing in New Orleans, what the process is like for writing his books, and how he deals with leaders that demand a lot from their employees, like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.

One story was a recurring theme through the evening. When Isaacson was growing up in New Orleans, he would go fishing with a friend of his who was deaf, but could read lips. Her dad would always join them and drink whiskey and smoke cigars. Isaacson would ask his friend what her father did for work, and she would tell him that he was a writer.

This made Isaacson curious because he never realized writing could be a job; when he asked his friend’s father more about it, he was told, “If you come from New Orleans you are either going to be a preacher or storyteller, and the world has preachers, so please become a storyteller.”

Isaacson talked about how Elon Musk’s leadership style had changed since he was in government.

“I think if you want to know what Musk is doing in government, the playbook we’ve seen, it happened over the past 20 years,” Isaacson said. “I think the book I wrote describes very much of the character that we’re seeing now.”

Isaacson then discussed how his college life affected his journey to being a journalist. “When I was at college, I thought I was going to be an academic. I studied economics and philosophy, but I realized that there was an exciting world out there of being a writer and a journalist, and so I joined the humor magazine when I was in college, and I just loved it because you were able to make people happy and amuse them.”

“And so I fell in love first of all with magazines, our humor magazine in college and then Time magazine,” Isaacson added. “I think nowadays it’s a shame that we don’t really have old-fashioned magazines, magazines that are beautiful in their design that talk about all sorts of different subjects. I was very lucky in life to be involved in what I think was a golden age of magazines, which was, you know, in the 1980s and 1990s.”

While talking about his time at CNN, Isaacson commented, “I wish I’d known a lot more about television and the fact that I don’t really like television as a way to convey information and it was sometimes in life you take jobs that you’re not suited for. I think I was very well suited to be at Time magazine because I like storytelling.”

“At CNN I did not understand the craft of storytelling through television, and television was becoming more polarized and opinionated,” Isaacson said. “I like to be a storyteller rather than somebody pushing opinions, so I probably made a mistake deciding to go to CNN. I should have stayed in print journalism.”

Lastly, when asked if he had any advice for aspiring journalists, Isaacson said, “To be curious about all fields, not to focus just on being a journalist or a writer but being somebody who knows science, who knows medicine, who knows music. Be curious about everything and the more fields that you enjoy exploring, the more you’re going to be able to see patterns in nature.”

Isaacson talked a lot about these stories while giving his lecture, and he also said his next book will be about Marie Curie, the Polish and French chemist who discovered polonium and radium.