• A distillation of Red Letter guidelines assembled from the life of George C. Marshall
• A practitioner's examination of a single characteristic--leadership

There have been more biographies of George C. Marshall than any other Army Chief of Staff or Secretary of Defense and almost any Secretary of State. This is not another one. Stewart Husted recognizes that for Marshall leadership was a verb, not a noun, and this book conjugates it. It is a leadership book bereft of most academic jargon--no collaborative synergisms, no Type A, B, or even C, no Theory X or Y, nothing approaching charismatic, not even a paradigm, shifting or not shifting.

The Marshall Library, Bland's Papers, Pogue's Marshall, and nearly 100 other sources have been carefully plumbed to extract and glean Marshall leading, Marshall talking about leading, and Marshall teaching leadership. Only the biography and history is repeated as are necessary to putting the leadership issue in context. And the context is as current as tonight's CNN or Fox News--preparation for war, diversity, the United Nations, negotiating with France, disloyal generals, overreaching politicians, dealing with Russia and China. In this milieu, it should be noted that this is a book about democratic (small D) leadership.