The Little Book of Leadership Development

Foreword

LEADERSHIP, I HAVE SAID over the years, is the ability to raise one’s voice over the general chaotic buzz of an organization and later turn out to have been right. I came up with this “definition” partly out of frustration over all the definitions that there are of this word that attracts so much interest, and partly from a realization that we don’t often think of giving or receiving “leadership” in the instant that it is occurring. Only later do we realize that either we or someone else had supplied “leadership.”

In the instant we are doing what we think needs doing. Our behavior is specific and concrete, and of course quite complex. Meanwhile, “leadership” is abstract and general. The words we use to talk about it—words about style ...