One of the original leadership gurus, Abigail Adams, had it right when she counseled her son John Quincy that hard times are the crucible in which character and leadership are forged. “It is not in the still calm of life or the repose of a pacific station that great characters are formed,” she wrote to him in 1780. “The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulty. Great necessities call out great virtues.”

It is in Abigail’s spirit that we may come to consider this era to be a moment of dumb luck–in which one generation melted down the economy so that the next generation might grow strong and imaginative in devising a rescue plan and a new future. The crucible has been supplied, and the generation of the crucible has now been summoned.

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There are reasons enough for optimism. In just the past several years I have seen my classes of aspiring leaders move from an interest in endeavors characterized by self-interest toward a sense of shared responsibility for our society and world.

The raw materials are now in place for leader-making–and I have long been convinced that the best leaders are made, not born. Even a brief look at a Nelson Mandela, a Winston Churchill or a Mohandas Gandhi reveals that their most dramatic development came at relatively late stages of their lives. So leadership can be taught, or to put it more accurately, leadership can be caught–through the lessons and stories of those who came before us, through mentoring and, of course, through a season in the crucible that no generation has experienced since the Greatest Generation.

Over the past six decades, I have witnessed every conceivable approach to leadership education. The leadership vacuums of recent decades reveal that even the best business schools have not done their finest at teaching some core aspects of leadership.

The first of those core aspects is the capacity for good judgment–the ability to make right decisions while flying blind, based on knowledge, wisdom and an ability to stay wedded to an overriding goal. As Democrats and Republicans bicker today about prescriptions for economic renewal, let us not even pretend to act as though we can be any more certain than a first-time parent. Certainly we have heard considerable advice from those who came before us, yet we must work in a constantly evolving context, improvising without a net.

Second is the ability to engage others and move them alongside you, toward a shared purpose or meaning. This flows from what the psychologist and science journalist Daniel Goleman calls “emotional intelligence,” the capacity to understand and connect with the hopes and fears of those around you. Too many brilliant and skilled people have failed, to their own shock, because they lacked this.

However, the things that have not been taught well in the B-school classroom or the corporate university can still be caught by the Crucible Generation. Lacking our comforts and facing uncertain threats, they will have a heightened receptivity to lessons from the world around them. Smart educators will seek to build on this serendipity in traditional classrooms and learning communities.

Also, I find myself increasingly convinced that there is a third key to leadership, which is respect. After a recent lecture on the leader’s imperative to grant respect, I played the classic Aretha Franklin song for my class of bright 21- and 22-year-olds. Watching them sway passionately to it, I realized this was no mere oldie to people born two decades after its release but rather an anthem of sorts. Respect signifies a person’s capacity to see you for what you have done; disrespect signifies that you are invisible. This Crucible Generation longs to grant and be granted respect. And if it succeeds in its calling, it will be respected for centuries to come.

Abigail Adams had the advantage of seeing opportunities in a challenging but seminal age. At the founding of the U.S., when our population was less than 4 million, we had six towering leaders: Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Franklin and Adams. Now that we number more than 300 million, we are surely capable of yielding at least 600 world-class leaders, or even more given this generation’s challenges. The truth may be that history, in its kindness, gave this new generation a grand crucible challenge, as it did my own. The young of today have been summoned to receive that same kindness through the collective failures of their elders.

I am betting that they will respond.

Warren Bennis, University Professor at the University of Southern California, is the author of a newly revised, 20th anniversary edition of On Becoming a Leader, which was named the best leadership book of all time by Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten in their new volume, The 100 Best Business Books of All Time.