The one-sentence summary
Smart leaders set a course, assume it will change, and try to get lots of people to show leadership qualities.
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WHAT THE BOOK SAYS
- The authors have three main influences; psychologists and other leadership writers, writers with unusual insights, and philosophers who have pondered the human condition
- They describe the point of leadership as being “to initiate change and make it feel like progress”
- Leaders need to adopt a cause but should not plan the future
- Leadership is not always necessary – the need for it varies over time
- Leadership is a culture, not a person
- Managers achieve objectives. Leaders work to a purpose
- Managers defer decisions. Leaders take them
- Don’t be too consensual about consensus
WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT
- It is full of good advice and inspiring quotes such as:
- “Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy.”
- “Now that I am CEO, what am I supposed to do?”
- “The only real training for leadership is leadership.”
- “Leadership has a harder job than just choose sides. It must bring sides together.”
- The Triangle of Tensions summarises the struggle of leaders well. It includes:
- The Individual Identity – who the leader really is
- The Canned Role – the formal expectations
- The Emergent Process – the messy reality
- Personal mastery of this is only achieved via Learner Leadership, a never-ending circle of self-awareness, learning, judging, acting and mobilising
WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH
- The orientation of the book leans towards money making as the desired outcome of successful leadership –this is clearly not its only value
- The authors claim that it is impossible to have too much leadership in an organisation – not all would agree
- There is a rather strange chapter on the value of using story-telling to encourage people to follow your chosen direction, which needs to be treated with caution