Barbara Kellerman - Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence

LEADERSHIP

OTHER LEADERSHIP BOOKS BY BARBARA KELLERMAN

Followership: How Followers
Are Creating Change and Changing Leaders

Women and Leadership: The State of Play
and Strategies for Change, coeditor with Deborah Rhode

Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters

Reinventing Leadership:
Making the Connection Between Politics and Business

The President as World Leader,
coauthor with Ryan Barilleaux

Leadership and Negotiation in the Middle East,
coeditor with Jeffrey Z. Rubin

Political Leadership: A Source Book, editor

Women Leaders in American Politics,
coeditor with James David Barber

The Political Presidency: Practice of Leadership

Leadership: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, editor

Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence

Edited and with Commentary by

Barbara Kellerman

Copyright 2010 by Barbara Kellerman. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-07-163785-5

MHID: 0-07-163785-0

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FOR MELA LEW AND THE OTHERS
WHO SHARED MY PASSION FOR THE POWER OF WORDS.

PART 1
ABOUT LEADERSHIP

PART 2
LITERATURE AS LEADERSHIP

PART 3
LEADERS IN ACTION

MAHATMA GANDHI,
Conditions for Becoming a Satyagrahi,
SatyagrahaNot Passive Resistance, and
The Essential Law of Satyagraha

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.,
Letter from Birmingham Jail

Great gratitude to Mela Lewfirst student, then colleague, now friend.

And appreciation to Mike Leveriza, who gave assistance from day one.

We ought to be grateful to language
for making life messier than ever.

RICHARD POIRIER

What should leaders learn? Given the countless number of leadership courses, seminars, workshops, institutes, centers, books, films, exercises, experiences, teachers, coaches, and consultants, this is a question to which we would seem to have an answer. And we dofour at least: (1) leaders should develop certain skills, such as communications skills, negotiating skills, and decision-making skills, (2) leaders should acquire awarenessmost obviously self-awareness and contextual awareness, (3) leaders should have practice in, for example, mobilizing, managing, and creating change, and (4) leaders should learn the difference between right and wrong.

There is another, a fifth, answer to the question, albeit one that is altogether different. This book is about what leaders should learnbut it is decidedly not, deliberately not, about what leadership education has lately come to look like. It is not, at least not directly, about skills; nor is it about awareness as currently construed; nor is it, for that matter, in the least experiential or focused especially on ethics. Rather, this book is a throwbackit is traditional. It asserts the importance of acquiring a fixed body of knowledge that is the leadership canon: the great leadership literature.

The question of what leaders need to learn is not new. Confucius had an answer, as did Plato and Machiavelli, and W. E. B. Du Bois and Mary Parker Follett. Moreover, this particular question merely mirrors the more general one: What do any of us need to learn? What, in this day and age, is the mark of a good education?

The debate about what should be taught and to whom tends to be contentious. In recent years, battle lines have been drawn between those who believe that a twenty-first-century education should be more practical than anything else and those who believe just the oppositethat, in the wry aside of academic gadfly Stanley Fish, higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the