Practical 'Lessons on Leadership' from Newt Gingrich

Newt Gingrich recently spoke on leadership at the Young Republican Convention in Washington, D.C. I didn’t find out about the convention until afterward, but the entire video of the speech was posted on YouTube. While the speech and the setting are both political, Gingrich is speaking on leadership in non-partisan sense and his lessons are applicable to anyone passionate about bettering himself and her community.

I am an admirer of Newt Gingrich‘s political acumen, from his historic “Contract with America” in 1994 as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives to a few of his more recent projects, including the Center for Health Transformation and American Solutions for Winning the Future.

Gingrich speaks with a bluntness atypical of a man who has spent so many years in politics. If you want to know more about leadership not only in politics but in life, this video is worth your time. Obviously, Gingrich speaks as a conservative, but if you can get past that you’ll find his lessons in leadership are pretty comprehensive and genuinely American.

After watching the speech a few times, here are some notes I took summarizing a few of Newt’s remarks which I found to be particularly powerful.

• Govern on behalf of the entire country — echoing a “red-white-and-blue” mentality rather than “red versus blue” politics which he calls “suicidal.”
• Speak first personally, second historically and third politically. Speaking solely politically is trivial and irrelevant.
• If you focus merely on the base of a political party, you’re marginalizing the independents, who will think you’ve gone nuts.
• A science and technology based entrepreneurial free society should produce more choices of higher quality at lower cost. Gingrich calls this “the greatest challenge” our generation faces.
• On health care, learning and environmental policy he asserts, “if we can’t offer better quality at lower cost we shouldn’t be in the business of politics.”
• Real leadership must be done with missionary zeal.
• Be bold enough to go out with big ideas, to describe them in personal terms and believe in them deeply enough to stand on the platform and win the argument.
• If your leaders aren’t leading, they’re not leaders. They’re placeholders.
• “Adolescence is a failed 19th century social experiment. Prior to the nineteenth century, you were either a child or you were a young adult. The average age of admission to Princeton at the time of the revolution was 13½.”
• We ought to match tax cuts with government budget cuts.
• Politics and government are central to the survival of a free society. If we can’t get a generation of leaders to stand up and say, “I’m not going to take baloney anymore, I’m not going to be passive, I’m not going to be intimidated by incompetent leaders, I’m not going to be intimidated by a party structure that doesn’t know what it’s doing. I’m going to go out and take the beating in order to lead, but I’m going to do it every day until I get good at it, and I’m eventually going to help this country find its way back to the right track. If you would do that, you would be startled over the course of your lifetime at the impact you’ll have.”