Chapter 1LeadershipWhat Do We Really Know about Leadership?
If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.
—THOMAS AQUINAS
What do we really know about leadership? There's been a lot of talk about leadership lately. Judging from the vast number of books, articles, blogs, TED Talks, and more, you would think we have a treasure trove of information about the subject. A quick search on Amazon.com returned 192,136 books dedicated to leadership. In addition, there are hundreds of theses, thousands of articles in journals as well as thousands more research papers on the web. They have been written by a variety of professionals that not only include psychologists but also management theorists, historians, politicians and political scientists, theologians, philosophers, journalists, and other social commentators. Their contributions include scientific analyses, scholarly biographies, and popular accounts of leaders' lives. Knowing how to most effectively lead others can be pretty confusing with that amount of knowledge swirling around. In fact, it's hard to imagine that anyone could think of themselves as an expert in leadership in today's world when there's so much information available.
The Leadership Explosion
How do you deal with so many books on a single subject? Well I have to admit there's no way I was going to go through that many publications. But as I started doing my research, I found that most books fell into one of three categories. ...
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