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

Introduction: Flying Through a Thunderstorm

Few subjects have so preoccupied the business world in recent years as that of leadership. Witness the explosion of articles, books, training courses, and programs purporting to teach managers how to lead. Since the early 1990s, for example, the Harvard Business Review has published some 350 articles on the subject of leadership—135 of them since 2000 alone. Recently, one of the world's leading financial-services companies, Merrill-Lynch, began publishing an entire magazine devoted to the topic.^[1] Initially targeted at the company's senior-management ranks, the magazine aims eventually to attract a broad senior-executive audience. And where business is going, the academy is never far behind. Leadership ...