Book Review: Gurus on Leadership

I am indebted to Bill Alley, MD of IT Production (Hosting) at Xchanging for inspiring me to look into the whole concept of "Leadership", as distinct from "Management". This particular book has proved a gold mine of succinct inspiration and a great starting point for the whole concept of leadership.

A word of warning, however. The first section of this book appears to be very much a personal "rant" by Mark Thomas about the poor state of leadership in politics and business today, both in the USA (reference Enron, etc.) and Europe as well (Ahold and Parmalet, among others). The tone of this missive is very much along the lines of "power corrupts". He is right, of course, but this does appear a very subjective polemic, which does not necessarily contrast well with the more objective tone of the rest of the book.

Section two is where most people will turn, where we are given a brief potted history of the key thoughts of many of the management leadership gurus over the years. Naturally, John Adair and Tom Peters are there, as are others who I had not heard of in the same way. The full list is extensive:

Guru	Date	Topic
John Adair	1965	Action-centred Leadership: Task, Team and Individuals.
Warren Bennis	1947	On becoming a Leader: leaders are made, not born.
Robert Blake & Jane Mouton	1964	The Managerial Grid: Country Club, or Task Manager?
Ken Blanchard	1982	The One Minute Manager
Rickie Gervais	2000	A modern leadership icon - David Brent (surprisingly?)
Peter Drucker	1954	Management by Objectives
Fred Fielder	1967	Contingency Theory
Daniel Coleman	1995	Emotional Intelligence
Paul Hersey	1969	Situational Leadership
Manfred Kets de Vries	1990	The psychology of Leadership: Power, Podium, Perks and Praise
John Kotter	1996	Leading Change
James Kouzes and Barry Posner	1983	Leadership and followership: followers make leaders powerful.
Nicolo Machiavelli	1513	The Prince: know how to enter into evil when necessity demands
Abraham Maslow	1943	Human motivation: hierarchy of needs.
Douglas McGregor	1960	Theory X and Y: the carrot and stick approach.
David McClelland	1998	Achievement and Motivation: the need for achievement, power and affiliation.
Tom Peters	1987	Thriving on Chaos: constant change in here to stay.
W.J. Reddin	1970	3-D theory of Management: Task, Relationships, Effectiveness.
Tannenbaum and Schmidt	1973	Leadership continuum: Tell-Sell-Consult-Share-Delegate.
Abraham Zaleznick	1977	Managers and Leaders - Are they different?