Moses and the Journey to Leadership: Timeless Lessons of Effective Management from the Bible and Today’s Leaders (review)

In this book, Norman Cohen explores what he judges to be the enduring lessons of leadership drawn from the life and career of Moses. Provost at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cohen sees in Moses the “paradigm from whom every future leader can learn” (p. ix). Moses, he argues, offers an alternative model to the failures of twentieth-century secular leadership. He is an “exemplar of the leadership to which we may all aspire” (p. 4).

It is immediately apparent in this work that Cohen is not concerned with issues of biblical criticism; nor does he engage in scholarly debates about authorship, historicity, or comparative literary streams. And, judging from the fact that he uses leadership and management synonymously in the book’s full title, neither does he appear influenced by widely held standards and research from the field of leadership studies. He is, on the other hand, a respected professor of Midrash, and in this work he assembles and explicates scores of midrashim designed to retell the story of Moses as the quintessential Jewish leader.

Little in this work is new. Both Aaron Wildavsky’s The Nursing Father: Moses As a Political Leader and Burton Visotzky’s The Road To Redemption: Lessons From Exodus on Leadership and Community provide ample testimony to Judaism’s long tradition of crafting leadership insights from the Mosaic archetype. Nevertheless, Cohen’s trek over well-trod territory is not without value and insight. Following the order of the biblical narrative he recounts the formative and transformative events in the Moses story in an effort to help would-be leaders learn lessons both timely and timeless. Some of the most noteworthy sections include discussions of the links between Moses’ humility and his effectiveness as a leader (p. 20), the interdependence between leaders and followers (pp. 35, 68, 114), the need for decisiveness in leadership (p. 47), the difficulties a leader faces in overcoming self-doubt (p. 65), and the imperative of leaders identifying and training successors (pp. 82, 96,152, 161, Chapter 16).

In an effort to infuse the ancient with an air of contemporaneity, Cohen includes more than eighty supplementary insets designed to enhance the sacred writ with material drawn from the sayings and biographies of individuals described as “today’s leaders.” Laid out on the printed page in a fashion reminiscent of a rabbinic work (except that in this case, the gloss is in a larger point-size than the core text), these “contemporary parallels” frequently fall far short of their desired outcome. Several of the featured individuals are deceased and have been for many years (e.g., Winston Churchill and Ernest Shackleton, to cite the book’s most over-utilized examples), causing the reader to wonder what exactly it means to be one of “today’s leaders.” Of greater significance is the fact that no explanation or background is provided as to why the featured individuals were chosen, making the pedagogic value of their inclusion elusive at best. Most importantly, the linkages between the case of Moses and the “leader” being discussed are often tenuous or convoluted. Two examples among many will make the point. Moses is compared to Larry Bossidy, former CEO of Allied Signal, apparently because both once asked their followers to endure short-term sacrifices for the sake of an enticing vision of the future (p. 32). Equally curious is the connection made between Moses’ actions immediately prior to the splitting of the Red Sea (sic) and Jon Carlzon’s behavior when, as CEO of SAS Airlines, he stood up to Air France, “which threatened to stop SAS from flying to France” (p. 47). While some of the book’s other attempts at comparative case-study do work better (p. 129), this feature often appears artificial, serving more to distract than to enhance or elucidate.

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