Jason Mangone
Chief Executive Officer at Newbury Franklin Home Services and co-author of the national best-selling book "Leaders: Myth and Reality".
Jason Mangone has taken a circuitous route to small business leadership. He began his career as an infantry officer in the United States Marine Corps from 2006-10, including deployments to Iraq and Haiti. After his military service, he was a Research Associate at the Council on Foreign Relations.
After graduate school Jason expected to return to work in the national security sector, but ended up running the Aspen Institute’s Franklin Project, an initiative to make a year of national service a common expectation for every young American. He led the Franklin Project’s merger with two other nonprofits, resulting in the creation of the Service Year Alliance, where Jason was Chief Operating Officer.
He then spent a year helping to build New York City’s Department of Veterans’ Services as a Senior Advisor to the agency’s Commissioner. In 2018, he co-authored the national best-selling book Leaders: Myth and Reality, which the Financial Times named a “Best Business Book of 2018.” His writing has also been published, among other outlets, in the Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Task & Purpose, and Philadelphia Inquirer. Most recently, he was the Chief Operating Office of Acme General Corp., a consulting firm focused on national security innovation.
He lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his wife and three kids, who he is raising to be Mets, Jets, Knicks, and Rangers fans because he believes that resilience builds character.
Philosopher's Notes on Jason Mangone's Books
Leaders
by General (Ret.) Stanley McChrystal, Jeff Eggers and Jason Mangone
I got this book after I saw General Stanley McChrystal’s blurb on the back of Ryan Holiday’s Lives of the Stoics. I read it in one 8.8-hour Deep Work-filled day. It’s fantastic. McChrystal uses Plutarch and his profiles of some of history’s most prominent figures as his inspiration and focuses on thirteen leaders in six pairs plus one standing alone. Almost all leadership books are prescriptive in nature. This book is not. Rather than make us believe that there’s a nice, simple recipe for leadership, McChrystal, Eggers and Mangone present us with the “myths” of leadership and the MUCH MESSIER “realities” of leadership. After the profiles of the thirteen leaders, the authors present the three myths of leadership and their new definition of leadership. We end the book with the sober recognition of just how complex, dynamic and context-specific good leadership is. It’s a challenging, important book that’s difficult to distill into a nice and tidy and practical 6-page Note but I’m excited to share some of my favorite Ideas as we all continue to step up into our own idiosyncratic expressions of Heroic leadership. So... Let’s get to work!