On Leadership Book

Of the grave problems challenging America today -- from the environment to troubled youth to international economic competition -- none is more critical, or more relevant to all these issues, than our crisis of leadership. Drawing on an intensive five-year field study of organizations and interviews with hundreds of contemporary leaders, John W. Gardner provides a brilliant, searching examination of leadership as it is practiced, or malpracticed, in America today. He reaches beyond the customary cries for charisma to what he calls "the issues behind the issues" in leadership: the elements of motivation, shared values, social cohesion, and institutional renewal. Some of the nation's toughest problems have discernible solutions, but to mobilize the required resources and to endure the necessary sacrifices calls for a capacity to focus our energies and to sustain commitment. Effective leaders heighten both motivation and confidence. But their efforts are fruitless if fragmentation and divisiveness prevail. Leaders must revitalize our shared values and beliefs in order to accomplish effective group action. Gardner argues persuasively that the increasing complexity of the large-scale systems that dominate modern society works to stifle motivation, and he shows how we can make those large-scale systems flexible and adaptive. It is essential to the vitality of such systems that initiative and responsibility be widely dispersed so that many individuals at all levels will be ready and willing to take leadership action to make their part of the system work. Leaders must understand the needs of the people they work with -- their needs at the most basic level for income, jobs, housing, and health care and their larger needs for a sense of community and mutual trust, for recognition and respect, and for new challenges and visions. The conventional wisdom asks followers to believe in their leaders; Gardner highlights a more searching question, whether leaders believe in their followers. Leaders must help people believe that they can be effective, that their goals are within reach. In key chapters on community, renewal, and leadership tasks, Gardner shows, with compelling examples and enlightening anecdotes, how extraordinary energy and human talent can be marshaled to support leaders who truly understand the ingredients of community. But where are the leaders who could set the new standards of our national life? Gardner convinces us that, scattered throughout society at all levels of government, in the corporations, unions, and nonprofit groups are the unawakened leaders, feeling no overpowering call to lead and hardly aware of their own potential. Always insightful and often eloquent, Gardner compels us to think hard about what successful leaders must do to instill confidence, morale, and motivation in those who look to them.Read More