Encyclopedia of Leadership

I've just re-read this brilliant book and decided keep it close and periodically review it. It is a collection of ready recipes that you might have known about, but not always apply to practice. Each recipe usually contains one or two small case vignettes.

I can call this book "the encyclopedia of leadership" - the items cover almost the entire area leadership, and the items are small enough to review them quickly.

The drawback of this title is that it doesn't seem to cover problems and tough issues of leadership that always arise. To fill this gap, I can recommend the unique framework by Ronald Heifetz described in the books "Leadership Without Easy Answers" and "Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading".

When the authors look to the leader in context of the organization, the view is a little bit mechanistic: "focus on clear standards, set the goals to keep on track, etc". I do not complete share this mechanistic view. Of course, leaders are important, but I agree with Margaret J. Wheatley who says that organizations are living systems. They are like people, intelligent, creative, adaptive, self-organizing and meaning-seeking. The simpler way to organize human endeavor requires a belief that the world is inherently orderly. The world seeks organization. It doesn't need humans to organize it, it doesn't seem to share our desires for efficiency or neatness, it uses redundancy, fuzziness, dense webs of relationships, and unending trails and errors to find what works; life is intent on finding what works, not what's "right"; life creates more possibilities as it engages with opportunities; life is attracted to order. I can recommend the book "Leadership and the New Science" by Margaret J. Wheatley.

There are the other aspects of leadership that should be scrutinized in much greater detail, but they definitely exceed the size of the single book. "The Leadership Challenge" is an excellent work, but don't stop on it, keep reading the other leadership and self-development books.

Real How-To Information

This book has been around in various editions for almost twenty years now. One reason for that is that it is an excellent overview of leadership in organizations and how you can do it yourself.

The book's structure follows its basic recommendations. The authors recommend five fundamental practices, each of which has two commandments, for a total of ten. In general, these are both straightforward and insightful. "Challenge the Process" talks about searching for opportunities, experimenting, and taking risks. "Modeling the Way" talks about setting the example and planning small wins. There is also material on "Enabling Others to Act."

Then there are a couple of weaker sections. Sections on inspiring and encouraging simply are too fluffy and lack the support that is given to other points.

Even having said that, this is a book that's worth reading if you are responsible for leadership in an organization of any size. The reason is the way the book came together.

The authors used two different kinds of research to develop their recommendations. They looked at over five hundred leaders, but they looked at them in a particular way.

In each case, they had asked the leader to talk about his or her actions as a leader when they were doing excellent work. In other words, they looked for excellent examples of leadership and tried to draw lessons from them.

They also went to the other side and talked to followers about what they wanted in leaders. When they put those two kinds of research together, you get recommendations that are both practical and, for the most part, behavioral.

Warren Bennis' recent book, Geeks and Geezers, is an excellent companion for this book. In that book, Bennis talks about crucibles of leadership or experiences, which provide intense stress and learning of leadership that form leadership values.

On the plus side this is good, practical, behavioral and helpful if you're responsible for a group of any kind or size. On the downside, some of the language can be fuzzy and simplistic, and some of the concepts, like "Encourage the Heart" sounds just a tad too New Age for my taste.

One of the best books on Leadership out there

The Leadership Challenge by Kouzes and Posner remains one of the best leadership books in circulation today. The one thing that I love about all of Kouzes and Posner's books is that the principles that they espouse can be broken down into a number of practices and are thus made easier to remember. For instance, in this book, the Leadership Challenge I remember the five practices of leadership through the Acronym MICEE as in (1) Model the Way (2) Inspire a Shared Vision (3) Challenge the Process (4) Enable others to act and (5) Encourage the heart.

These are practical principles that all leaders can live by. If you don't have it, get it, you won't regret it.