June 22, 2015

Finest Hour 110, Spring 2001

Page 42

By Richard M. Langworth

The Churchill Factors: Creating Your Finest Hour, by Larry Kryske. Victoria, B.C.: Trafford, 2000. Trade paperback, 230 pp., published at $17.95. Member price $16

Winston Churchill said, “I was happy as a child with the toys in my nursery; I have been happier each day since I became a man.” With the sole exception of the Dardanelles episode, when his wife “thought he would die of grief,” Churchill was, as his daughter has said, “a supremely blessed and happy human being.”

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There was no doubt about his happiness and, for the most part, his optimism. How blessed he was is a relative question. Churchill had no inherited wealth, no apparent academic proficiency. When he switched from a military career to politics, he found himself laboring to conquer a lisp, and on one early occasion lost his train of thought in the middle of a speech and had to sit down. What he did inherit was a taste for living like a grandee, but with no family money labored hard, particularly after he fell in love with a money pit named Chartwell.

Writing is not easy. It is almost always hard work, and most writers would rather face the dentist than get started on the next piece. Churchill was a self-starter, and his methods for getting one and one-half or two days out of one are well known.

Larry Kryske, a former naval officer, joined the Churchill Society nearly 20 years ago, served on its board of directors and was master of ceremonies at its 1988 conference at Bretton Woods. He spoke of walking through London after being detached from USS Goldsborough, drinking in the shrines. Kryske came face to face with the demands of leadership in his own career; his knowledge of Churchill showed him how to apply Sir Winston’s precepts.

“While there have been many books about Churchill, and a few books about Churchill’s leadership, until now there have been few ‘how to’ or selfhelp books that used Churchill’s practices,” Kryske writes. “My book on ‘applied Churchill’ has immediate applicability to people of all ages—college students or mid-lifers planning their careers, executives expanding their businesses, homemakers looking toward their future after their children leave home, government decisionmakers setting a new policy course.

“I give practical suggestions and customized questions to ponder, involving how a person can devise a vision, generate the courage to take that first step, and follow through with determination until they achieve their vision. All of this simple formula for success is interwoven with examples from Churchill’s life and is reinforced with over 120 quotations by Churchill and other prominent leaders. The Churchill Factors is more than a book on leadership. It is a book on how to lead joyful, productive, successful life: the Churchill way.”

This self-help manual is divided into six parts: “Changing Your Destiny, In the Wilderness, A Grand Alliance, The Landscape of Leadership, Mobilizing the English Language and Applying the Churchill Factors.” There is also a good appendix on the author’s favorite Churchill books, audiotapes and videos—I wish more authors who include bibliographies would actually say which books they liked.

“There is a special time in each person’s life,” Kryske writes, “when all of his or her past preparations become perfectly aligned with some significant opportunity”—May 1940, of course, in Churchill’s case. You must recognize your time when it comes. To do so, you need to engage in self-analysis.

Kryske classifies people into four groups: Drivers, Influencers, Supporters, Conceptualizes. Drivers are fastpaced, mission-oriented people. Influencers are fast-paced, people-oriented. Conceptualizes are slower-paced and mission-oriented. Supporters are slower-paced and people-oriented.

Kryske lays out a course of action for each. Aside from the beginning and end of his book, if you are a Driver, you read Part Two; if an Influences Part Three, and so on. The Driver learns how Churchill was energized by the challenge of Hitler, how he applied “three proven principles for success: vision, courage and determination.” Churchill had a vision of victory, the courage to say what he thought, and the determination to see the business through, with little prospect of success. As Lady Soames has often ruefully remarked, reading how this or that young historian would have done things differently in her fathers shoes:

“You have to remember that at the time there was no guarantee that we were going to win.”

Take the example of Churchill and the Hitler challenge and forge your own counterpart, Kryske tells the Driver. What are your greatest challenges in life? What are you committed to accomplishing over the next five years? What qualities do you use to control outcomes? Has there been any cost to them in the past? What alternatives may secure the same results without the cost? Finally, “what words do you want on your tombstone?” Few of us think about that, but we should. Churchill quoted something to the effect that when one is about to be hanged, “it concentrates the mind wonderfully.”

The Churchill Factors, Kryske says, “are simple, but not easy….their application requires intention, discipline, and dedication. You can use them any time you want—but failure of imagination, of will, or to use your time effectively, can thwart you. The Factors enable us to overcome the first two failures. The third only an individual can conquer. Among the Churchill and other quotes peppered usefully throughout this book is one by actor Michael Landon: “Somebody should tell us, right at the start of our lives, that we are dying. Then we might live life to the limit, every minute of every day. There are only so many tomorrows.”

Only one previous self-help work, Steven Hayward’s excellent Churchill on Leadership, has arrayed Churchill’s guiding philosophy so broadly. Like Hayward, Kryske offers something that should be required reading—not necessarily by students, but by teachers, it is not Politically Correct: it doesn’t shrug off failure. Kryske adheres rather to the MacArthur maxim that there is no substitute for victory.

History’s greatest leaders did not accept that no one would be “judgmental” if they turned out secondrate. Each of them reacted vehemently to some great challenge: Joan of Arc to the plunderers of France, Roosevelt to the Depression, Gandhi to the Raj, Reagan to the Soviets, Martin Luther King to racism. Mr. Kryske offers as his teacher the greatest example of them all.