Conversations on Leadership E-Book

Lan Liu

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 418

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

A veritable who's who in leadership, Conversations on Leadership features Warren Bennis, Jim Kouzes, John Kotter, Noel Tichy, Peter Senge, James March, Howard Gardner, Bill George, and others. Since each leader has a distinctive approach, this book provides the multi-faceted truths of leadership to broaden and deepen the understanding of the readers.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Praise

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction

What is Leadership?

Eight Disciplines of Leadership

A note of invitation

Endnotes

PART I - Essential Leadership Qualities

CHAPTER 1 - Jim Kouzes: Leadership is Everybody’s Business

Leadership is about Ordinary People

Leadership is about Movement

Managers must be Leaders

Leadership is about Popularity

Leaders are also Followers

Asians are more Forward-Looking

The Humility Factor

Leaders are Teachers and Learners

Preaching and Practice

CHAPTER 2 - Warren Bennis: Generous Leadership

A Generalist with a Leadership Brand

An Old Dog with New Tricks

The New Crucible and an Old Epiphany

Five Leadership Qualities

Generous Leaders

Schultz: Showing Respect

Sculley: Adaptive Capacity in Action

An Example of Learning

Leaders vs. Followers

Drucker or Bennis: Who Said It?

Why “Leading”?

Endnotes

CHAPTER 3 - Bill George: Authentic Leadership

Leading and Teaching

Where Leadership Starts

Leadership is Defined by Life Story

Life Story: Crucible Plus Epiphany

All Great Leaders are Authentic

Setting a Bad Example

Setting a Great Example

Serving the Customer First

Business Ethics in China

Endnotes

PART II - Leadership in Organizations

CHAPTER 4 - Peter Senge: Leading a Learning Organization

Rediscovering Leadership

Learning vs. Teaching

Leading a Learning Town?

Indicators for a Learning Organization

Two Levels of Effective Teaching

Becoming a Human Being

The Purpose of a Business

Endnotes

CHAPTER 5 - Noel Tichy: Leading a Teaching Organization

Leadership is Transformational

Leadership is Top-Down

The CEO as Head Teacher

Leaders should also Learn

Storytelling in Leadership

Jack Welch, the Leader of His Time

Why Leaders Fail

Building a Leadership Pipeline

Learning from Welch

Endnotes

CHAPTER 6 - Jerry Porras: Success Built to Last

Redefining Success

The Road to Success

Learning from Failure

Two Types of Leader

Organizational Architect

Purpose Beyond Profit

A More Complex View of Vision

Endnotes

PART III - Leading Through Storytelling

CHAPTER 7 - Howard Gardner: Leaders as Storytellers

A Cognitive Approach to Leadership

The Major Form of Stories

Einstein as a Leader

Stories Need to Engage the Audience

Leaders Know Themselves

Five Minds for the Future

Endnotes

CHAPTER 8 - John Kotter: Stories as a Force for Change

A Different Vehicle for Change

An Important Tool for Change

How Managers Use Stories

Telling a Good Story

Three Kinds of Leadership Story

Different Personalities in a Change Process

Maintaining a Sense of Urgency

Combining Leadership and Management

Aspects of Leadership Development

Kotter’s Leadership

Endnotes

PART IV - Complexities in Leadership

CHAPTER 9 - James March: Leadership and Life

How to Define Leadership

How to Distinguish Leaders

How to Learn from Don Quixote

Finding Joy and Beauty in Leadership

Current Business Leaders

How Business Institutions can Stimulate Learning

How to be a Teacher/Leader

How Context Matters

How to Study Leadership

CHAPTER 10 - Joseph Badaracco Jr.: Leading Quietly and Morally

Works of Literature as Case Studies

Defining Leadership

Quiet Leadership

Ethically Sensitive Pragmatism

Choosing Between Right and Right

Becoming Who You Are

American, Japanese, Chinese

CHAPTER 11 - Manfred Kets de Vries: Leadership on the Couch

A Clinical Approach to Leadership

Understanding the Inner Theater

The Darker Side of Leadership

Get an Organizational Fool

Who are the Potential Leaders?

Beware of Charismatic Leadership

Prescriptions for Effective Leadership

Balancing EQ and IQ

Leadership in the World

PART V - Eastern Perspectives on Leadership

CHAPTER 12 - Cho-yun Hsu: Leading the Confucian Way

Leadership through an Historical Lens

Leaders should have a Sense of History

Obama’s Sense of History

Mao Tse-Tung’s Sense of History

Tactics vs. Vision

The Call for Intellectual Leadership

Chinese Books for Leaders

Developing Leaders in the Confucian Way

Leaders Need Truth from a Friend or a Jester

The Accidental Teacher to Business Executives

Government and Corporation Compared

The Corporation as Tribe

Leadership in the New Heterarchy

CHAPTER 13 - Debashis Chatterjee: Leading Consciously

Leadership Wisdom in the Indian Tradition

Inclusive and Vertical: The Indian Orientation toward Capitalism

The Inner Side of Leadership

Leadership is a State of Consciousness

Conscious Leaders in the World

Applying Consciousness in Business

The Caste System and Conscious Leadership

Leaders Work on the System and Create History

Indians Look for Spiritual Strength in Their Leaders

Leadership Lessons from the Bhagavad Gita

The Indian Leadership Style

Endnote

AFTERWORD

Index

Advance Praise for Conversations on Leadership Wisdom from Global Management Gurus

A provocative, engaging and lively series of conversations with top thinkers that provide both inspiration and illumination for managers.

Hayagreeva Rao Atholl McBean Professor of Organizational Behavior Stanford Graduate School of Business

Lan Liu’s book Conversations on Leadership is full of insights and practical advice on the nature of leadership. The book is unique not so much in its summary of leadership theories by scholars of world renown, but in its conversational approach to discussing leadership in its historical and cultural contexts with many of those who have been instrumental in shaping ideas and practice in this field. As such, this book is a valuable addition to the bookshelves of both students of leadership and corporate practitioners alike.

Dr. John Yang Dean and Professor, Beijing International MBA Program Peking University

Through his vivid conversations with leadership masters from both the West and the East, and through his efforts to integrate their thoughts in a way that takes them beyond the American model, Lan Liu has opened a new page in our understanding of what leadership is, what it means and the qualities required of leaders. This book will, I am sure, prove to be a great guide to anyone who aspires to lead in this global era, whatever the context.

Michael Yu Founder, Chairman and CEO New Oriental Education & Technology Group

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-0-470-82569-3

Typeset in 11/14 pt Minion-Regular by Thomson Digital, Noida, India.

To Andi and Baqiao,with faith that you will be the leader of your own life and make a difference for the world

Foreword

The way I learn most effectively, I discovered long ago, is in conversation with others. It is in the playful, exhilarating, joyous thrashing out of ideas with brilliant people that my own ideas are brought to life, refreshed, and vetted. George Braque once observed, “The only thing that matters in art is the part that can’t be explained.” Perhaps the only thing that matters in leadership is the part that we struggle to capture and bottle. Conversation has been one of my main pathways to pursue it.

Lan Liu surprised me with this shared passion when he visited me in Santa Monica on a pleasant morning two years ago. He had made an appointment with me as a “leadership student” and also editor-in-chief of China’s leading management magazine. He told me that he was going to talk to Jim Collins, Jim Kouzes and James March on the same trip; he had already spoken to, among others, John Kotter, Ronald Heifetz, Peter Senge, and Bill George when he traveled to the United States last time; and he was planning to visit Howard Gardner, Noel Tichy and more later on.

I was impressed of course, more by his charm than his ambitious and exciting plan. He was fabulous at learning from conversation. I asked him in an email later, “Do all, well, not all but do most Chinese have your whimsy and humor?” I dropped a note to my co-author Noel Tichy the very day and encouraged him to talk to Liu, “Spent an hour with him this morning and found it worthwhile. I guarantee that you will find him engaging and thoughtful.”

Now with this book, which I am glad that I made a little contribution to, I find my time spent with Liu even more worthwhile as it wouldn’t be just the two of us learning from our conversation. Liu has made a unique contribution by scouting around for all those extraordinary leadership thinkers, engaging them in thoughtful conversations, getting the best ideas out of them, and presenting them in a delightfully readable format. None of the above is an easy task, but all are fulfilling ones. I have to confess a principled envy of Liu’s capacity to engage others. All leadership students, researchers, educators, or practicing managers and public servants who aspire to become a leader, should have this tome as a compulsory reading. “Dialog is the oldest and the most effective way of learning from a master,” writes Liu. He does it well.

The second major contribution of this book is the eight disciplines of leadership Liu has summarized those thinkers’ ideas into: (1) Connecting with people, (2) Learning from failure, (3) Reflecting on experience, (4) Thinking deeply, (5) Storytelling, (6) Being a teacher, (7) Knowing yourself, (8) Becoming yourself. Those disciplines —a word Liu has carefully, and rightly chosen to make the point that leadership requires daily practice and continuing hard work—aren’t novel or fancy; I have covered many of them in my book On Becoming a Leader. But as evidenced in being the constant themes those thinkers hit again and again, they are the compass directing the journey of becoming a leader.

All eight disciplines are pivotal, and can’t be addressed lightly. For example, although I already wrote a lot about “knowing yourself” and “becoming yourself,” recently I revisited this topic in “Leadership as a Performing Art,” an essay included in The Essential Bennis. In it I told a story about Sydney Pollack, the late Oscar-winning director who once told me that he was at a loss when he first moved behind the camera, so he simply acted like a director. “I even tried to dress like a director—clothes that were kind of outdoorsy,” he said. That raises crucial questions about leadership. Can a leader be authentic, or do the masks of command force the leader to be something other than his or her true self? In becoming yourself can you both act and be real? These are questions with no easy answers. The role of a leader is usually greater than the individual and thus worth taking on. Pollack made the leader’s requisite leap into the unknown and he excelled.

Liu’s third big contribution is he has opened a door to the exchange of leadership thoughts between the West and the East. Few such books, if any, have brought in thinkers from China and India and made their voice as sonorous as those from the United States and Europe. As Liu points out, leadership has been to a large extent an American product, and American scholars tend to pursue a universal leadership model.

I don’t think such a pursuit is completely futile. Just as there are universal laws in many other human activities, there are universal laws in leadership too. However, particularly at this era when “the world is flat,” as Thomas Friedman vividly depicts for us, the cultural aspects of leadership deserve more attention from our fellow Americans, particularly those in leadership positions.

Culture isn’t the only lens through which we should see leadership, but it’s the one we shouldn’t miss. I personally find the cultural lens provided in this book illuminating. For example, I have written about the failure of the George W. Bush presidency in the new Introduction to the twentieth anniversary edition of On Becoming a Leader, “One of Bush’s major failings, I believe, was his overriding commitment to an ideology rather than to principled pragmatism. In foreign affairs, for example, Bush acted in the fervently held belief that democracy is universally desired and desirable and will ultimately triumph. That ideology proved particularly ill-adapted to the realities of the Middle East.” Cho-yun Hsu, a Chinese historian, reminds me from this book that what I see as an ideology problem can be seen from a cultural lens and interpreted as an illustration of the Christian Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, as opposed to the Confucian Golden Rule: Don’t impose on others what you don’t want others to impose on you. Hsu’s comment is refreshing, “That is precisely the American problem. The Americans have been leading the world for such a long time, but nobody has thanked them for it. Their attitude is ‘My way is the better way. You follow me.’ The Chinese believe in not doing unto others what you don’t want others to do unto you. This prevents you from imposing yourself; it’s for toleration.”

I also wrote about the economic downturn initiated by the 2008 financial meltdown, “They resulted from lack of leadership at every level, including failures by government officials and those heading the banking and financial services industries.” I partly blame this to ideology as well, “because of the administration’s ideological disdain for government itself, one of the of the most destructive forces at work during the Bush years was the corrosive drip, drip, drip of privatization unchecked by effective oversight. It caused the outsourcing of much of the war in Iraq, inadequate oversight of the financial sector and other industries, and the stealthy semi-privatization of Medicare and other government programs.” It is enlightening to see this from a cultural lens too. Liu reminds us in the Afterword that this might be attributed to a cultural bias toward utilitarian achievement in the United States, and so it is not only a failure of leadership, but perhaps the failure of leadership of the American model.

I was inspired by my talk with Liu. I am even more inspired by the conversations he has had with other leadership thinkers. Trust me, you will be too.

Warren Bennis University Professor and Founding Chairman of the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California His memoir, Still Surprised: A Memoir of a Life in Leadership will be published in 2010

Acknowledgments

It wouldn’t have been possible for me to compile this book without the help of many people. First and foremost, I am grateful to those 13 Masters included in this book: Joseph Badaracco Jr., Warren Bennis, Debashis Chatterjee, Howard Gardner, Bill George, Cho-yun Hsu, John Kotter, Jim Kouzes, James March, Jerry Porras, Peter Senge, Noel Tichy, and Manfred Kets de Vries. They kindly shared their time and insights with me to make this book happen. I am truly honored to have had the opportunity to collaborate with this “Dream Team” in the field of leadership.

Some deserve particular credit: Warren Bennis, for introducing me to other leadership thinkers and writing a very generous foreword; Jim Kouzes, for encouraging me to pursue the idea of an English book; James March and Peter Senge, for writing a foreword for my Chinese book Master Classes of Leadership, which has spawned this book.

I am also privileged to have spoken to the following people on management and leadership when preparing for this book: Jim Collins, Thomas Davenport, Ronald Heifetz, Philip Kotler, Daniel Quinn Mills, Scott Snook, and Robert Sternberg. Although those conversations didn’t make their way into this book, they helped me toward a better understanding of the subject of leadership.

A special note of thanks must go to Jet Magsaysay, a dear friend and mentor. He participated in this project from the very beginning by recommending candidates I should interview and made great efforts to review and edit almost each chapter before I submitted the manuscript. Aside from being a management expert, he was a great critic and editor. Professor Steven DeKrey reviewed an early version of the manuscript. His comments are deeply appreciated.

Joel Balbin, C. J. Hwu, Nick Melchior, and John Owen, of John Wiley & Sons, have worked with me closely on this book. C. J. Hwu saw the value in a cursory book proposal and helped to perfect it. Nick Melchior provided precious comments on the manuscript, and managed most of the publishing efforts as the senior editor. Joel Balbin, the production editor, made his best efforts to coordinate the production and keep the schedule. John Owen, the wonderful copyeditor, took great pains to polish the manuscript. It was really a pleasure to work with all of them.

After I shaped the idea of the Eight Disciplines of Leadership, I was able to test it as an educator at executive development programs hosted by corporations and universities. I am thankful to those program participants for providing useful feedback, and to the organizers, particularly Professor Ye Zicheng of Peking University, for offering me the opportunities.

Last, but by no means least, I would like to thank my wife, Chen Zhongzhu, for her incredible patience and solid support, and my two sons, Baqiao and Andi, for interrupting my work in various, delightful ways while I was writing this book.

INTRODUCTION

The Eight Disciplines of Leadership

Few subjects have attracted more attention yet generated more confusion than leadership. As James McGregor Burns put it in his 1978 classic Leadership: “Leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth.”1

Misunderstandings of leadership abound. Just take one example: leadership is often regarded as heroic; therefore turnaround leaders such as Lee Iacocca at Chrysler, Lou Gerstner at IBM, and Carlos Ghosn at Nissan are highly admired. It is no wonder that many people view a post-crisis era, such as the period of the 2008-09 financial meltdown, as the greatest leadership challenge.