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Leadership the Hard Way: Why Leadership Can't be Taught– and How You Can Learn it Anyway

Leadership the Hard Way: Why Leadership Can't be Taught– and How You Can Learn it Anyway

by Robert Howard, Dov Frohman
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
Release Date: April 2008
ISBN: 9780787994372
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Book Description

Leadership the Hard Way presents a method of living and working that can truly facilitate the learning of leadership. Their method shows how to go against the current, fight conventional wisdom, and embrace the unexpected. It is about trusting oneself and valuing intuition, principles, and imagination as much as hard skills and analysis. Frohman combines his counterintuitive ideas with experiences from his own background-from escaping the Nazis as a child to becoming a leading innovator in the semiconductor industry-to show how readers can build their own leadership abilities. A leader's values and personality, he ultimately reveals, are the only sure source of stability in a world of continuous change.

Table of Contents

  1. More Praise for Leadership the Hard Way
  2. Warren Bennis
    1. A WARREN BENNIS BOOK
  3. Books in the Warren Bennis Signature Series
  4. Copyright
  5. Foreword
  6. Introduction: Flying Through a Thunderstorm
    1. Thunderstorm Over Greece
    2. An Environment of Turbulence
    3. A Self-Taught Leader
    4. A Different Kind of Leadership Book
  7. 1. INSISTING ON SURVIVAL
    1. 1.1. A Wartime Childhood
    2. 1.2. "The Last Operation to Close in a Crisis"
    3. 1.3. Containing Fear
    4. 1.4. Setting "Impossible" Goals
    5. 1.5. A Catalyst for Innovation
  8. 2. LEADING AGAINST THE CURRENT
    1. 2.1. Leadership as Counterculture
    2. 2.2. Apart from the Mainstream
    3. 2.3. Winning the War for Talent
    4. 2.4. Learning from Mistakes
    5. 2.5. From the Periphery to the Center
  9. 3. LEVERAGING RANDOM OPPORTUNITIES
    1. 3.1. Turning a Problem Into a Product
    2. 3.2. Staying True to a Vision
    3. 3.3. Striking When the Iron Is Hot
    4. 3.4. Going Through the Window
  10. 4. LEADERSHIP UNDER FIRE
    1. 4.1. A Different Kind of War
    2. 4.2. A Question of Survival
    3. 4.3. Thinking Differently
    4. 4.4. The First Attack
    5. 4.5. "Scud Business as Usual"
    6. 4.6. Delivering-No Matter What
  11. 5. THE SOFT SKILLS OF HARD LEADERSHIP
    1. 5.1. Freeing Up Time
    2. 5.2. The Discipline of Daydreaming
    3. 5.3. Trusting-and Testing-Intuitions
    4. 5.4. Communicating Through Behavior
  12. 6. MAKING VALUES REAL
    1. 6.1. Being Relentless About Values
    2. 6.2. Saying "No"
    3. 6.3. Transparency, Not Purity
    4. 6.4. Acknowledging Mistakes
    5. 6.5. Maintaining the Tension Between Values and Behavior
  13. 7. BOOTSTRAPPING LEADERSHIP
    1. 7.1. Staying True to Your Passion
    2. 7.2. The Invisible Mentor
    3. 7.3. Becoming a "Reflective Practitioner"
    4. 7.4. Learning from Your People
  14. Epilogue: Knowing When to Let Go
  15. Notes
  16. Acknowledgments
  17. The Authors
    1. 7.5. Dov Frohman
    2. 7.6. Robert Howard