About the Author
Larry Kryske is a respected authority on the life of Sir Winston Churchill. He has served on the Board of Directors of the International Churchill Society. Larry combines over thirty-five years of Churchill study with over thirty years of worldwide leadership and teamwork success. He is a certified trainer and seminar leader as well as a member of the National Speakers Association. A retired U.S. Navy commander, he holds a BA from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and a MS from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Larry is President and Co-founder of Homeport Training & Development.
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Introduction This book can change your life! If you are looking for a way to get off the treadmill of frustration and despair and start living the life of your dreams, you have come to the right place. The message of hope contained in this book can propel you toward your dreams. It can help you create your finest hour. The Churchill Factors is for the person who is pressed for time. You will not have to wade through laundry lists of leadership principles that are hard to remember. Instead, you will discover what really matters most about personal leadership and achieving your dreams. By keeping the ideas simple, practical, and timely, you will be able to apply these concepts right away. This book uses Winston Churchill as a role model. Unlike most of the books about Churchill, this one will not bombard you with a large number of facts, figures, or analyses of his life. That is the job for biographers and historians. The Churchill Factors can more accurately be called "applied Churchill." You will learn about Churchill's best practices involving leadership as well as his proven strategies for success. "Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do." - Goethe The real value of history is not the knowledge itself, but rather the application of the knowledge to live a more productive and fulfilling life. The late Russell Kelfer perhaps said it best when he observed that, "When knowledge becomes personal, we have understanding. Applying this understanding yields wisdom." Thus, the goal of this book is not to give you knowledge about Churchill, but rather his understanding of life that he distilled into wisdom. In his celebrated 1923 book, The Art Spirit, artist Robert Henri observed, "Simplicity is the soul of art." This belief can equally be applied to our lives. Simplicity is the soul of life! This does not imply that life is simple. Science and other disciplines have brought us an overabundance of information about every subject, including leadership and Churchill. Life is indeed complex, but if we can help other people to understand, and then apply, what they have learned, they will be able to benefit from this new understanding. Many of today's historians seem preoccupied with denigrating the decisions and character of men like Churchill. It is truly unfortunate that these learned writers second-guess decisions made in the heat of battle and with imperfect knowledge while they have abundant, detailed information gleaned years after the events from all parties involved. These 20/20 hindsight commentators should be more humble! Therefore, three quotations will serve as our guide. "Many of those who write about history like to seem wiser than those who made history." - David Howarth "Both Lincoln and Churchill have not lacked their critics; the reputations of both seem likely to endure." - Maxwell Schoenfeld "Criticism is easy; achievement is more difficult." - Winston Churchill If we truly understand a subject, we can simplify it. The most complex processes can be broken down into the most basic components. Simplifying a subject allows us to see the forest as well as the trees. Look in any bookstore and you'll find shelves devoted to every facet of leadership. (That's because leadership is one of those topics that we recognize as vitally important to our survival, both in business and in our personal lives.) We can learn the leadership secrets of everyone from Attila the Hun to Abraham Lincoln to Captain Kirk of "Star Trek." We can find books about leadership that is invented, reinvented, visionary, strategic, servant, maximized, charismatic, innovative, intuitive, breakthrough, and enlightened. We can also have our leadership by the numbers - the seven habits, the fourteen points, the twenty-one irrefutable laws, or the hundred-and-one stories.
