Leaders Talk Leadership
Top Executives Speak Their Minds
Edited by Meredith D. Ashby
& Stephen A. Miles
Oxford University Press
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When you put together a book in which current business leaders, 47 of them in this case, talk about leadership, the obvious question is: How do you pick them? The next point is that such a book is only as good as the questions asked by the authors, though these questions can only arise from the structure of leadership that they already have.
The leaders appear to have been picked on the basis of popular ideas of what constitutes success. This means that you get thoughts ranging from the profound to the trite. The views are disparate, ranging from paying for performance to celebrating the spirit. As Jim Collins, the author of Built to Last and one of the contributors here, points out, some of the greatest leaders are not celebrities at all. The challenge, then, is to find them.
The book is structured around five topics. Leadership and people management are the first two. The next two deal with strategy and competitive advantage, while the last is on stakeholder view but it is confined to the shareholder and employees. The resultant canvas is, thus, broader than leadership per se.
To the authors this framework must have been self-evident, so they make no effort to validate their choice for what they call an anthology of leadership tales. In the end there are no tales either, but lots of dry opinions set in a structure that seems to limit free exploration.
Many prominent leaders talk of their own methods and concerns, but because the authors have gone short on interpretation or finding affinities, no consistent message really emerges. What makes for great leadership remains elusive, unless one searches for pearls like Jim Collins who, in an un-American way, recognises that leaders must grow or evolve out of egocentric levels. Another pearl is David S Pottruck who talks of generosity of spirit.
A dominant strain of this book is the so-called