Rudolph Giuliani demonstrates how the leadership skills he practices can be employed successfully by anyone who has to run anything. Opens with a gripping account of Giuliani's immediate reaction to the September 11 attacks, including a narrow escape from the original crisis command headquarters, and closes with the efforts to address the aftermath during his remaining tenure.
Human knowledge about organizing and leading complex collectives reaches back thousands of years. When Jethro advised his son-in-law, Moses, to resist micromanaging, to lead by example, and to delegate authority to persons of integrity, he articulated some of the earliest recorded organizational recommendations. This engaging book taps into the wisdom of the ages to illuminate modern approaches to leadership. Leadership through the Ages examines intrinsic leadership; that is, how to build leadership skills and how to apply them. It is based on the premise that leaders are not born knowing how to lead. Rather, skill sets can be learned and sharpened, while styles of communication and interaction can be cultivated. Sylvias presentation is liberally sprinkled with sage advice and examples from the best of Eastern and Western traditions, from Confucius and Sun Tzu to Cardinal Richelieu, Napolon, and Lincoln. To these are added modern theories of leadership illustrated with compelling cases from the real world.
Unfortunately, leadership does not have a one-size-fits-all definition. We all have our own ideas as to what makes a good leader and the types of challenges that will be faced. The author bridges a gap by presenting how modern leadership happens while simultaneously combining a description of leadership and its practical application in today’s environments. In this book, Nicholas Harkiolakis integrates the various theoretical perspectives into a unified model that can be understood by both the academic and the practitioner (existing and future leaders). This understanding is necessary to effectively treat and apply leadership to the challenging settings of today’s operational environments: virtual, distributed, multicultural and so on. Some of the key topics covered are: leadership through the ages characteristics of leadership modern perspectives an integrated leadership framework the application of leadership the twenty-first-century leadership practices.
All Leaders Face Adversity. Exceptional Leaders Thrive in It. Leadership is often a struggle, and yet strong taboos keep us from talking openly and honestly about our difficulties for fear of looking weak and seeming to lack confidence. But Steven Snyder shows that this discussion is vital—adversity is precisely what unlocks our greatest potential. Using real-life stories drawn from his extensive research studying 151 diverse episodes of leadership struggle—as well as from his experiences working with Bill Gates in the early years of Microsoft and as a CEO and executive coach—Snyder shows how to navigate intense challenges to achieve personal growth and organizational success. He details strategies for embracing struggle and offers a host of unique tools and hands-on practices to help you implement them. By mastering the art of struggle, you’ll be better equipped to meet life’s challenges and focus on what matters most. “Leadership and the Art of Struggle provides you with the opportunity to learn from Snyder’s remarkable wisdom. It is a living guide that you can return to time and time again as new situations arise.” —From the foreword by Bill George, former CEO, Medtronic; Professor of Management Practice, Harvard Business School; and author of the bestselling True North “The leadership book of the year...one of the most intelligent, revealing, and practical books on the subject I have ever read. It confronts a vital truth: that challenge is the crucible for greatness and that these adversities introduce us to ourselves.” —Jim Kouzes, coauthor of the bestselling The Leadership Challenge “Steven Snyder covers all the bases from channeling your energy to managing conflict, including a great segment about overcoming your leadership blind spots...This encouraging book is a must-read!” —Ken Blanchard, coauthor of The One Minute Manager and Great Leaders Grow “Leadership and the Art of the Struggle gives you clear and compelling advice on transforming pitfalls into possibilities.” —Jodee Kozlak, Executive Vice President, Human Resources, Target
Where is leadership when we need it? What can today’s corporate, non-profit, military, and public-service leaders learn from daring decisions that changed history? In Time to Lead, Jan-Benedict Steenkamp presents a fresh examination of history-making leaders by holding a magnifying glass up to a life-changing dilemma each of them faced. What we learn is how powerful the personalities of leaders and their decision-making processes can be in determining the course of human events—and the fates of millions of people. Steenkamp explains how these great men and women arrived at the solutions to the problems they confronted by virtue of their character traits and whether they were foxes or hedgehogs—as in the ancient parable—or, as he further categorizes, eagles or ostriches. Sixteen carefully curated case studies hold powerful lessons that today’s leaders can apply in their own professional lives. Readers will recognize Roosevelt, Washington, Mandela, Thatcher, Alexander the Great, and MLK, but other lesser-known leaders, such as Themistocles, Clovis, Peter, Fisher, and Nightingale provide equally valuable insights into how individuals make decisions based upon one of seven leadership styles (adaptive, persuasive, directive, disruptive, authentic, servant, and charismatic) and four personality classifications (hedgehog, fox, eagle, or ostrich). Steenkamp’s assessment tools provide seasoned and aspiring leaders alike with the means to not only determine their own individual styles, but how to step up when they inevitably come face-to-face with their own moments of truth. Chapter takeaways, leadership principles, and open-ended, reflective questions will confer encouragement, enrichment, and empowerment on readers when they realize they can utilize the same tactics as these leaders in their own lives. Time to Lead is about great men and women, their actions in leadership that have withstood the test of time, what we can learn from them—and the lessons that are relevant for us here and now.
This book serves as a guided introduction to the richly diverse perspectives on leadership throughout the ages and throughout the world. Each of the selections, introduced by the editor, presents enlightening thoughts on a different aspect of leadership. Writings by Plato, Aristotle, Lao-tzu and others demonstrate that the challenges of leadership are as old as civilization. Machiavelli, Tolstoy, Ghandi, and W.E.B. Du Bois provide a wide range of insights into the eternal practice and problems of leadership. Modern masters of leadership such as James MacGregor Burns, John Kotter, and Warren Bennis join such leading practitioners as Max De Pree and Roger B. Smith in discussing contemporary issues in leadership theory and practice.
Leadership by the Good Book will inspire, empower, and equip men and women to lead their businesses, their teams, their ministries, and even their families to greater heights and to have an eternal impact. For David L. Steward, founder and chairman of World Wide Technology, his philosophy for building a successful business is simple and founded on a Biblical principle: "For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve" (Mark 10:45 NIV). As a business leader, he says, the first priority is to serve employees. Together with Brandon K. Mann, these two leaders distill their wisdom in this field guide for leaders who want to bring respect, integrity, honesty, and trust to the workplace. Steward and Mann draw from personal experiences as well as share insights and examples of how God's Word has informed and influenced their leadership. Each chapter ends with a section titled Your Leadership Flywheel: Learn, Live, Lead, Legacy, which includes self-reflection questions, application of biblical principles, as well as a prayer.
You don't need a big title or a business degree in order to lead with impact. What you need is practical wisdom: the insight, judgment, and strength of character that all great leaders have, but that most business schools and corporate workshops don't teach. The Greats on Leadership gets you there. Jocelyn Davis takes you on an in-depth tour of the best leadership ideas of the past 25 centuries, featuring classic authors from Plato to Winston Churchill, Shakespeare to Jane Austen, C.G. Jung to Peter Drucker, and many more. In a style both thought provoking and entertaining, she shows how -history's great writers have always been, and still are, the real leadership gurus. Davis spells out the behaviors that distinguish true leaders from misleaders and covers 20 specific leadership topics, including: Leadership Traps (Shakespeare) Change (Machiavelli) Power (Sophocles) Dilemmas (Madison, Hamilton) Communication (Lincoln, Pericles) Personality Types (Jung) Motivation (Frankl) Judgment (Maupassant, Melville, Austen, Shaw) Character (Churchill, Plutarch, Shelley, Joyce) Each chapter begins with a synopsis of a great work by the author and then draws out the key leadership insights, weaving them together with business examples, the best contemporary research, and tools to help put it all into practice. In the last two chapters Davis presents a new way to think about leadership levels, framing them in terms of the impact you have rather than the title on your business card. Whether you're a recent graduate or MBA searching for something more inspiring than the standard textbook, a new manager looking for something deeper than the typical how-to book, or an experienced executive seeking ideas to lift you to the next level, this remarkably readable and practical guide will set you on the road to becoming a great leader.
Around the turn of the first millennium AD, there emerged in the former Carolingian Empire a generation of abbots that came to be remembered as one of the most influential in the history of Western monasticism. In this book Steven Vanderputten reevaluates the historical significance of this generation of monastic leaders through an in-depth study of one of its most prominent figures, Richard of Saint-Vanne. During his lifetime, Richard (d. 1046) served as abbot of numerous monasteries, which gained him a reputation as a highly successful administrator and reformer of monastic discipline. As Vanderputten shows, however, a more complex view of Richard's career, spirituality, and motivations enables us to better evaluate his achievements as church leader and reformer.Vanderputten analyzes various accounts of Richard’s life, contemporary sources that are revealing of his worldview and self-conception, and the evidence relating to his actions as a monastic reformer and as a promoter of conversion. Richard himself conceived of his life as an evolving commentary on a wide range of issues relating to individual spirituality, monastic discipline, and religious leadership. This commentary, which combined highly conservative and revolutionary elements, reached far beyond the walls of the monastery and concerned many of the issues that would divide the church and its subjects in the later eleventh century.
