To Risk It All Nine Conflicts and the Crucible of Decision

From one of the great naval leaders of our time, a master class in decision-making under pressure told through the stories of nine famous acts of leadership in battle, drawn from the history of the United States Navy, with outcomes both glorious and notorious The ultimate point of Admiral James Stavridis’s training as a naval officer was to lead sailors in combat, to face the decisive moment in battle when it arose. In To Risk it All, he offers up nine of the most useful and enthralling stories from the US Navy’s nearly 250-year history, and draws from them a set of insights that we can all put to use when confronted with fateful choices. Conflict. Crisis. Risk. These are words that have certain meanings in a military context—meanings we hope will never apply in quite the same way in our own lives. At the same time, as To Risk it All shows with great clarity, many such lessons are universal. To Risk it All is filled with thrilling and heroic exploits, but it is anything but a shallow exercise in myth burnishing. Every leader in this book has real flaws, as all humans do, and the stories of failure, or at least decisions that have been defined as such, are as crucial as the stories of success. In the end, when this master class is dismissed, we will be better armed to face our own hard decisions, both expected and not.