The Leader's Companion: Insights on Leadership Through the Ages [Paperback]

This book serves as a guided introduction to the richly diverse perspectives on leadership throughout the ages and throughout the world.

Each of the selections, introduced by the editor, presents enlightening thoughts on a different aspect of leadership. Writings by Plato, Aristotle, Lao-tzu and others demonstrate that the challenges of leadership are as old as civilization. Machiavelli, Tolstoy, Ghandi, and W.E.B. Du Bois provide a wide range of insights into the eternal practice and problems of leadership. Modern masters of leadership such as James MacGregor Burns, John Kotter, and Warren Bennis join such leading practitioners as Max De Pree and Roger B. Smith in discussing contemporary issues in leadership theory and practice.Chapter 1

The Cry for Leadership

John W. Gardner

John Gardner has served six presidents of the United States in various leadership capacities. He was Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, founding chairman of Common Cause, co-founder of the Independent Sector, chairman of the National Coalition, and president of the Carnegie Corporation and Foundation. He is currently the Miriam and Peter Haas Centennial Professor at Stanford Business School.

Why do we not have better leadership? The question is asked over and over. We complain, express our disappointment, often our outrage; but no answer emerges.

When we ask a question countless times and arrive at no answer, it is possible that we are asking the wrong question -- or that we have misconceived the terms of the query. Another possibility is that it is not a question at all but simply convenient shorthand to express deep and complex anxieties. It would strike most of our contemporaries as old-fashioned to cry out, What shall we do to be saved? And it would be time-consuming to express fully our concerns about the social disintegration, the moral disorientation, and the spinning compass needle of our time. So we cry out for l£)