Thought Leaders

Thought Leaders:

Insights on the Future of Business

Joel Kurtzman, editor

A Strategy & Business Book

San Francisco, Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1998

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How do thought followers - like me - tango with thought leaders like each of the 12 people in Joel Kurtzman's book?
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Easy.

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First, you link the name of each of the 12 to the interview before it got put into a book. So, if you are reading this review, you don't have to buy the book.
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Then, you let each of the thought leaders lead. In this case, by quoting the words from each of the 12 that the editor put in an idiot's box. This way you can decide which of the 12 interviews you want to read.
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- Charles Handy, a professor at the London Business School: Suddenly, growth for its own sake sounded like a very funny concept. In order to hold people inside the corporation, we can't really talk about them as employees anymore. Boots, the big British drug and chemical company, built a corporate headquarters that can't hold more than a hundred people.
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- Minoru Makihara, President of the Mitsubishi Corporation: Where there are changes, there are always opportunities. Eventually, I believe we will have to fix Return on Equity at a certain rate. That will create greater incentives. We feel that you can't penalize someone for having been assigned to work in a declining area.
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- Keshub Mahindra, Chairman of Mahindra & Mahindra: Within a certain span of time, our products must become globally competitive. These rules were made in the foolish belief that the only people who had enough wisdom in this country were the people in the government. India's literacy rate is only about 50 percent. As a result, people find it very difficult to relate to the "new technologies".

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- CK Prahalad, a professor at the University of Michigan: No monarchy has ever fomented its own revolution. We don't want people who are satisfied with how things are. We want people who are curious, impatient, trying to buck the received wisdom. People at lower levels have less of a problem accepting their new strategic roles. The more difficult transition is for senior managers.

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- John Kao, a professor at Harvard Business School: Jamming is when you improvise and adapt to conditions. Jamming follows rules, not individual notes. The management of creativity is intimate. It deals with an individual's personal, psychological landscape. The traditional managerial mind-set is analytical. In a creativity-driven environment, a traditional managerial mind-set could do damage. The challenge is not to let people do whatever they want. The challenge is to create accountability in a nonmechanistic way.

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- Paul M. Romer, a professor at Stanford Business School: The first thing that you lose in the knowledge economy is the classical notion of the right price. The law of conservation of matter and energy states that we have the same quantity of physical stuff we have always had. The physical world is characterised by diminishing returns. The realm of ideas does not suffer from diminishing returns. When firms face increasing costs and diminishing returns, no single firm can supply the whole market. We're going to start to find much richer institutional arrangements to control the flow of information.

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- Stan Shih, founder, chairman and CEO of Acer Group: We are really something of a virtual corporation. We call it the Dragon Dream. The dragon is the Chinese people, and we Chinese want to contribute in a big way to a global society. The customer is Number 1. The employee is Number 2. The shareholder is Number 3. I keep this message consistent with all my colleagues.

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- Norbert Walter, Chief Economist, Deutsche Bank: There is the notion that if you failed once, you are basically dead. As a society, we are very risk averse. The government demands fire doors that could probably withstand a nuclear blast. It is what I call "unnecessary quality". When I was young, an entrepreneur was considered crazy. You are not considered an outlaw anymore if you start your own business.

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- John T. Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems: We now have a chance to acquire everybody. In our industry, you are acquiring people. And if you don't keep those people, you have made a terrible, terrible investment. You try to blend cultures. But you've got to have one culture that really survives, and there has got to be a clear leader. You have to tell the employees up front what you are going to do so you don't betray their trust later.

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- Warren Bennis, a professor at Marshall School of Business: Great Groups are a snapshot of the way organizations out to look - a graphic illustration of what's possible.The leader is rarely the brightest person in the group. Rather, they have extraordinary taste, which makes them more curators than creators. People in organizations may have vision, but there's zero meaning to what they're doing. They've actually forgotten why they are there. You should reveal as much as possible but without scaring people. You don't want to share things that will diminish enthusiasm.

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- Gary Hamel, visiting professor at London Business School: Challenging the status quo has to be the starting point for anything that goes under the label of strategy. A revolutionary challenges the prejudices and dogmas of the incumbent. The future is more often created by heretics than by prophets. Look at the assumptions people have made about who is and who isn't the customer. Is there another way to slice the pie? How do I know the difference between what is universal and what is American if my cultural understanding stops at the Atlantic?

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- Jean-Rene Fourtou, Chairman and CEO of Rhone-Poulenc: If you meet too often, you take away people's power. You do their work for them. You make their decisions for them. Problems started in companies when the workers and the CEOs stopped sitting together, stopped eating together, stopped sharing. If all you have are procedures and computer systems, you kill the organization and you kill the spirit of the people who work there.

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There it is. A 12 item buffet brain food meal. I hope you'll enjoy at least one of the things on the table.

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Is there bad news about this book?

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Yes. It's a set of thoughts from a set of 1996 and 1997 interviews.

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What was the world like in 1997? How old were you 13 years ago? I was a sexy 60 rather than a senile 73!

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This means the book points to a very basic question. How does one keep up to date? How does one keep in touch with the 2010 thought leaders about business?

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Here are five suggestions. They are based on what I do.

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One

Decide what interests you. What it is you want to keep up to date on? Perhaps it's your career field - like advertising. Perhaps it's a particular industry - like finance and banking. Perhaps it's a particular issue - like leadership or strategic thinking. In my case, there are two things about business that I try to keep up to date on. Two things that interest me.

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One is how to turn a failing or failed organization around. The other is to understand why academics and managers believe that most people who go to work want to get to the top rather than to keep out of trouble and earn enough money to spend on things that turn them on. Things like their family or a hobby or going on holiday.

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The first interest means I like to read as much as I can on great turnarounds. Like Lou Gerstner turning IBM around. Like Steve Jobs turning Apple around. My second interest is rooted in attitudes to work that I see around me.

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Two - about 90 minutes a month

Create or join an interest group that meets about once a month. The one I belong to meets on the first Tuesday of every month. For 90 minutes. From 5:00 to 6:30 pm. There are about eight of us. We take turns at introducing a topic for discussion. It's usually based on a short article from a popular business magazine, like Fortune or BOSS. Recently, we've talked about whether the ability to trust people is a necessary but insufficient condition for being an effective team leader. About how one can manage one's own and one's team's imagination? About taking Zen to work. About half the group are former students of mine. Everyone is moving upwards, either in banking or in consulting. Very good for keeping a brain as old as mine more up to date than it would otherwise be.

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Three - about 30 minutes of reading a week

Subscribe to a good business journal. I keep up to date on the first one, reading anything I want to read in the Monash University Library. The other two are also good. Mostly, I read only the table of contents and sometimes - like three times a year - I read something that interests me.

- Strategy and Business - I get the monthly update about what’s new. Each issue briefly describes articles by Booz & Company thought leaders or experts from the business world, selected for their management insight. Click here to register for the free e-mail update.

- McKinsey Quarterly

- Harvard Business Review

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Four = about 15 minutes of reading a week

Take a free subscription to a weekly update from a reliable source. I take the first. The other two are just as good.

- Harvard Business School Working Knowledge - I seldom read more than the abstracts. About 30 minutes of reading a week.

- http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/

- Yale School of Management RSS Feed

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Five = about 15 minutes of reading a day - about 8 hours of reading a month

Read at least one newspaper every day and subscribe to a monthly or quarterly general report on new books.
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Every day, I read Nine O'Clock and The Age. More precisely, I begin with the sections on sport where I read a fair bit of the stuff that's reported. For the rest, mainly I read only the national and international news headlines, as well as only the headlines in the business sections. This seldom takes more than 15 minutes of my day.
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I take the free subscription to Readings Monthly, most of which is also on-line. It carries short reviews of what's new in books and music and DVDs. Again, mostly I read only the titles of the books. The exceptions are books on sport, war and poetry. This takes about 30 minutes a month.

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Why the estimated times?

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To make a point.

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In a 30 day month, most of us are awake - in some sense of that fuzzy word! - for about 480 hours. My keeping up to date program takes about 12 hours of reading and discussion a month. That's only 2.5 percent of the time I'm awake during a month. This is why I never say anything when people tell me that it takes too much time to do what I do!

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For what it's worth, this is how I try to keep up with thought leaders in fields that interest me. I hope you find a way that works for you.
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James Moulder (plato@sims.com.au) is a retired business school academic who lives in Melbourne, Australia. His hobbies are theology and poetry.

Mary, Crown Princess of Denmark

Mary, Crown Princess of Denmark

Karin Palshoj & Gitte Redder

London, Allen&Unwin, 2005

Table of Contents 

Because she believed what her mother had told her, she kissed the frog. He turned into Frederik, the Crown Prince of Denmark. The next morning he asked her to marry him, which she did.

What her mother didn't tell her is that if you marry a once were frog, you end up in a leadership position. So she's on a learning curve. And she's doing well.

But who is she? And what can she teach us about what it takes to become a leader?

Mary Elizabeth is the youngest of the four children of John and Etta Donaldson. Her fairy tale story, which is well told by Palshoj and Redder, is short and sweet.

She was born on 5 February 1972 in Hobart, Tasmania, which is Australia's often forgotten island state. She was educated in state schools and at the University of Tasmania from which she graduated in 1994 with a combined degree in commerce and law. She moved to Melbourne soon after her graduation, took professional certificates in advertising and - except for about six months of working and travelling in Europe and America - worked for a number of Australian and global advertising agencies as an account manager.

On 16 September 2000, during the Olympic Games, Mary met Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark at a Sydney pub - the Slip Inn. A year later she moved to Europe, first to teach English in a business school in Paris and then to work for Microsoft in Copenhagen as a project consultant for business development, communications and marketing.

On 8 October 2003, she and Frederick were officially engaged. On 14 May 2004, they were married. On 15 October 2005, Mary gave birth to Prince Christian. On 21 April 2007, Princess Isabella was born. Mary is due to have twins in January 2011.

From a leadership perspective, Palshoj and Redder get going in chapter five, a chapter on going to princess school. A chapter that raises an unanswerable question that's difficult to resist. Are leaders born or made? Did Mary Elizabeth Donaldson come into the world on 5 February 1972 with everything it takes to be a leader? Or did she begin learning to be a leader only when she and Frederick were officially engaged on 8 October 2003?

As it stands, the way I've posed the problem is absurd.

In 1972, she couldn't speak English or Danish. She still had to learn all the things one learns at school and at university and working for an advertising agency. Also the things one learns by playing the piano, the flute and the clarinet.

And what one learns from playing games. Team games like basketball and lacrosse and field hockey. Individual competitions like swimming for one's school or riding one's horse. Finally, there are the things one learns in a marriage and from being a mother. Both of which are good environments for learning to be a leader.

OK. So let me try again. How about this more sophisticated formulation of the problem?

In 1972, when she came into the world, did she have everything it takes to LEARN what she has learned? Or was she taught to have what it takes to learn how to be a leader? In other words, how many of the qualities that people ascribe to Mary aren't innate? Things like her competitiveness, her determination, her curiosity, her reliability, her emotional intelligence? How many of these traits are qualities her parents and some of her peers and colleagues gave her or helped her to acquire?

So, now we have three options.

Leaders are born. Leaders are made by the environment in which they live before they become leaders. Leaders are made by being taught how to be leaders in the same sort of way that tennis players are taught to be tennis players. 　

Because we aren't yet smart enough to do a DNA analysis of Mary's genetic inheritance, we simply don't know what was there on 2 February 1972. The book on Mary's life - both before she was engaged to Frederik and subsequently - give us lots of evidence for the other two options.

Having parents that affirmed what she wanted to do instead of insisting on what they wanted her to do, helped to give her confidence in herself and fired her ambition. Having a horse helped her to develop all kinds of qualities. Like the courage to trust her horse in a jump. The discipline and patience for performing in the dressage. The ability to work with people of all ages and across gender differences.

Going to princess school also has left its mark. Mary has learned the language of Denmark Inc., both literally and metaphorically. Things like the body language that goes with being a royal instead of a commoner. The ability to retain one's privacy while belonging to a country. The ability neither to encourage nor to offend the media.

Both lists point towards how Mary has learned and is learning to be a leader. They point to qualities and behaviours that fuel her visits to places like disadvantaged migrant areas, as well as to her participation in an anti-bullying program for schools. In particular, they point to the values that created the Mary Foundation. It has two major aims. To advance cultural diversity. And to assist people who aren't part of a community because of circumstances which isolate or exclude them - like ethnicity or illness.

So, does what I've mentioned, as well as what I don't have the space to mention, settle the question? Have her experiences in the 30 years before she and Frederik were engaged, as well as the seven years she's been in the princess school, made her a leader?

Yes. Mary has spent 37 years learning how to be the leader she is and is becoming. Some of the learning was explicit. Most of it was implicit.

And yet, a worry remains. Because we don't know what her genetic inheritance was, perhaps she has learned what has made her a leader only because she was born with what it takes to learn what she has learned!

That, for what it's worth, is my bet.

Some of us have been fortunate enough to be born without the leadership gene. Without the gene that gives us the energy and the ambition to learn the things that have made Mary a leader. In other words, all sorts of people and experiences - from your parents to the people in HR departments to books - can teach you how to kiss a frog. But only if you aren't born with froggy-phobia.


James Moulder (plato@sims.com.au) is a retired business school academic who lives in Melbourne, Australia. His hobbies are theology and poetry.

　

Please note that the Palshoj and Redder book was published in 2005. For information on what has happened since, I drew freely on what's at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary,_Crown_Princess_of_Denmark 

Companies that Changed the World

Companies that Changed the World:
From the East India Company to Google Inc.
Jonathan Mantle
London, Quercus, 2008.

Table of Contents

Why's a wonderbra, a biro and a coke bottle a sexy combo?




Easy!


Each of them is made by a company that changed the world. And so did the companies that made your Swatch, your VW, your Nokia mobile, your IKEA furniture and your Walkman. And so did the other 42 companies that Jonathan Mantle introduces to us. From the oldest to the most recent. From the Honourable East India Company that was created in 1600 to Google which began in 1998.

This book was made for different reading styles. It works for a cover to cover approach. It also works for a need to know approach. For being used as an encyclopedia when you are curious about one of these 50 companies.

Best of all, it can handle various playful approaches, like what's the difference that makes a difference between the three motor-car manufacturers in the cast? Between Ford and Toyota and Volkswagenwerk?

How many of the companies are in the transportation business? For sure, there's Central Pacific and Union Pacific, Boeing, Virgin and the three motor-car manufacturers. But what about Thomas Cook and Western Union who move money about?

Two more of the same kind of question, but with a "the answer's not in the book" twist. First, why are so many of the companies that changed the world in the entertainment and information sector? Companies like Disney, EMI, Penguin, Sony, Nokia, CNN, Endemol, Al Jazeera and Google? Second, if Intel didn't exist, how many of the companies talked about in the book could not make what they are making today?

I enjoyed reading the book from cover to cover. I enjoyed these and other playful questions. Like what these companies teach us about being entrepreneurs and leaders, as well as about having or losing a value based culture. But what I enjoyed most were the chapters on three of my favourite companies: Disney, Sony and Swatch.

I like learning about - or being reminded about - Disney because I like learning about or being reminded about Walt. About his sleeping and day-dreaming his way through school. About his refusal to allow education to cripple his imagination. About him going bankrupt and being close to being bankrupt for more than two-thirds of his life.

There's also good news. More than a third of the world's population has seen at least one of the films he made. The legendary conductor, Leopold Stokowski, begged to be allowed to conduct the music for Mickey Mouse as The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

And there are the quotable quotes.
- If you can dream it, you can do it.
- It's kind of fun to do the impossible.
- Animation is a way of story telling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world.

Sony's story is about the marriage of Masaru Ibuka's engineering mind and Akio Morita's marketing hunches. Their first product was an electric rice cooker. It failed to sell. Out of the failure came a decision to move from imitating to innovating. And so to the first tape recorder, the first transistor radio, the first Walkman - that nobody except Morita believed would sell - and the first PlayStation.

Masaru Ibuka's legacy reached into education. Into the Sony Fund for Education and into his book, Kindergarten is Too Late. In the book he argues for an idea that's as revolutionary as any of his inventions: the time between nine months and three years is the most significant stage in a child's development.

Finally, there's Swatch's story, which is actually Nicolas Hayek's story. It's a cheeky story. Instead of supervising the liquidation of two major Swiss watchmakers, he bought the two companies. Instead of competing with the Japanese on quality, he chose a head-on confrontation with their products. Instead of marketing a watch as something one kept for life and handed down the generations, he got buyers to believe they had bought a disposable item. A fashion accessory, with Swatch standing for "second watch".

The market - in particular, the yuppie market - caught the mood. People began buying more than one model. Some of them wore two models at a time, either with one on each wrist or with the second one as a pony tail band. Between 1983 and 1993, Hayek took the Swiss share of the global watch market from about 15 percent to more than 50 percent. The first models have become collector's items which change hands for vast prices. Not least of all, because partnerships with well-known popular artists helped to underline the cutting-edge lifestyle imagery of the brand.

For Disney, as well as for Ibuka and Morita, failure came in their first ventures. For Hayek it came when he moved into partnerships with Volkswagen and Daimler-Benz to create the first "Swatchmobiles", the Eco-Sprinter and the Eco-Speedster. Hayek pulled out in 2005, because research and development costs were so high. But the concept of a car that's 2.4 metres long and 1.4 metres wide hasn't gone away, with millions of customers in 25 countries, predominantly in Europe and North America.

Each of the other 47 companies are as interesting and instructive as these three. The statistics also are interesting: 25 of the companies are based in the United States of America (USA); 21 in the evolving United States of Europe (USE); two in Japan and two in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia and Qatar). And for those who prefer images to numbers, there are delightful photographs of early advertisements for the products and services that launched these companies. And so, it's easy to recommend Mantle's book, both as fun to read and as a source of wisdom about leadership, as well as about creative thinking.

James Moulder (plato@sims.com.au) is a retired business school academic who lives in Melbourne, Australia. His hobbies are theology and poetry.

Exemplary Leadership

Exemplary Leadership: A Jossey-Bass Academic Administrator's Guide
James Kouzes and Barry Posner
Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2003
Table of Contents

If you have questions about leadership - in general or related to your situation - you may want to send them to James Kouzes at jim@kouzesposner.com or Barry Posner at bposner@scu.edu.

This book is for anyone who has a status position in a university. For anyone who is a rector or a vice-rector - a dean or a deputy-dean - a head of an academic or administrative department. It's also for two other groups of people. For those who aspire to have one of these status positions and for those who are looking for criteria they can use to do two things. To evaluate the performance of people in these positions or to elect people to these positions.

But, for those who have one of these status positions, there's a qualification attached. The book was written for those who wish to add value to the status they have. The value that comes from shifting the focus from what's being done to what could be done instead. The value that comes from having the courage to guide people within one's sphere of influence to places where you and they have never been before.

So, if you want to stop showing off in the shallow end of the pool, what must you do to prove yourself in the deep end?

Kouzes and Posner (K&P) have a three-dimensional answer. A slogan. A five-step guide to being an exemplary leader. And a set of suggestions to help you add value to the status position you have, or aspire to have.

The slogan is rooted in their research, as well as in the leadership literature. Leadership is a relationship. Either an effective relationship or an ineffective one. In either case, it's a relationship between those who have a leadership label and those who do or don't admire them.

Yes, it's as straightforward and as tough as that. Admirable leaders have credibility. And they are credible when they meet two conditions. They know what they stand for; know what they will and will not do. And they do what they say they will do. In K&P's summary: If people don't see consistency - if, for example, special favours seem to be shown, or staff are maligned, or colleagues are denigrated, or responsibilities are not accepted - they conclude that the leader is not serious or a hypocrite.

The five-step guide to being an exemplary leader are the Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership that are rooted in K&P's research, teaching and consulting. These are the practices of Modelling the Way, Inspiring a Shared Vision, Challenging the Process, Enabling Others to Act and Encouraging the Heart.

The behaviours that constitute these practices are pretty intuitive:

- Modelling the Way includes establishing principles concerning the way people should be treated and goals should be pursued. It also includes creating standards of excellence and modelling what it means to strive to honour them.

- Inspiring a Shared Vision is about implementing a set of passionate beliefs about what the part of the university which one leads can become. For rectors and vice-rectors these beliefs refer to the whole institution. For deans and deputy-deans these beliefs refer to the faculty they lead. For heads of department they refer to the departments they chair.

- Challenging the Process is part of inspiring a shared vision. It involves looking for opportunities to change the status quo; looking for ways in which things can be done differently, or done more effectively and efficiently.

- Enabling Others to Act is necessary because the goals that leaders have to achieve can be achieved only by teams in which there is mutual respect and trust; by teams in which people are encouraged to use the skills and knowledge which they have.

- Encouraging the Heart is about failure and success. About learning from - and assisting others to learn from - the mistakes that are inevitable. But it's also about celebrating success and creating the new goals that success makes possible.

The research that enables K&P to cover these five practices with illuminating examples goes back to 1983! It's rooted in what followers told them they looked for in a leader. In other words, this stuff comes from the people in the trenches. It doesn't come from their commanders! And it isn't theoretical stuff. It's about the behaviours that do and don't match each practice. And so, if you haven't got a copy of the book, you can get into what it's about by asking yourself when someone is or isn't in line with each of these things; when, for example, someone's behaviour does or doesn't encourage the heart. Better, you can invite the people who report to you to give you their lists of behaviour that counts for or against each of these five things.

Finally, there's the last chapter of the book. The chapter which argues that leadership is everyone's business. Why? It's possible to acquire the behaviours that are in line with the five practices. More importantly, it's possible to stop behaving in ways that are out of line with them. For sure, being a leader, as well as learning to be a leader, involves making mistakes. So does driving a car and learning to drive a car.

So here's a final K&P punchline:

We're all born with various sets of skills and abilities. What we do with what we have before we die is up to us.

an uncomfortable postscript

Most of the people who hold faculty positions in a university - myself included - don't want to be leaders. We find teaching and research more interesting and more challenging. So it may seem that K&P's slogan, guides and suggestions aren't for us, except as criteria for deciding who to elect as rectors or vice-rectors, deans or deputy deans, or as the head of a department.

Not so, say K&P. There's a sting in the tail of their book. Research shows that what followers look for in a leader, students look for in a teacher or lecturer or dissertation supervisor!

They spell it out on pages 11 and 12:

Like an admirable leader, an admirable faculty member is honest, forward-looking, competent and inspiring. Who'd want to take a course from someone who wasn't competent or wasn't very excited about the subject matter? How about instructors who don't do what they say they will do? Students say that their best teachers are able to get them to see the "big picture"; to understand how what they are being taught would assist them in a workplace. And they are forward-looking, with a sense of how things in their field could change in the not too distant future.

So, yes, this book is about exemplary teaching as much as it's about exemplary leadership. And so those of us who aspire to be admirable teachers could turn K&P's Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership into Five Practices of Exemplary Teaching by asking ourselves what kind of lecture-room behaviour does and doesn't model the way, inspire a shared vision, challenge the process, enable others to act and encourage the heart. And, if we are genuinely committed to these five practices, we'll find ways in which students - perhaps after they've graduated - can tell us when we did and when we didn't do what we were trying to do.

All of which means that this book is for everyone in a university environment. For those who have leadership positions, as well as for those who have teaching positions. It's for anyone who wants to add value to the status they have by delivering what their followers or their students are looking for.

one more thing

If you haven't got the time to read these 104 pages, there's another way to go. Invest in the 16 page Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership. When you have, first work through it on your own and then with the people you lead. It contains two case studies, short descriptions of each of the Five Practices, a section on learning to lead and background information on the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI).

If you have questions about leadership - in general or related to your situation - you may want to send them to James Kouzes at jim@kouzesposner.com or Barry Posner at bposner@scu.edu.

James Moulder (plato@sims.com.au) is a retired business school academic who lives in Melbourne, Australia. His hobbies are theology and poetry.

Leadership in Action

Leadership in Action: A Handbook for Leadership
Ashley Goldsworthy
Indianapolis: Dog Ear Publishing, 2009. ISBN 9781598589795

This is a distinguished Australian's integration of two things: being a leader at the highest levels and being a professor of leadership at the country's first private university.

It is this combination of the practical and the theoretical that gives Ashley Goldsworthy's book its distinctive flavour.

He immediately puts his two key ideas on the table. The first sentence of the book declares that being a leader is "about getting people to do what you want them to do, even when they might be inclined to do otherwise". The third sentence declares his other key idea: "leadership is a process".

Twelve clearly written chapters spell out this two-step manifesto. There are chapters on the difference between leaders and managers, on vision, on power and influence, on communication and on motivation. In these chapters the practical is illuminated by the theoretical. In the other six, the recipe is changed and the theoretical is illuminated by the practical. These chapters are reflections on being in front, on being behind, on the situation, on strategic IQ, on leading change and on leadership in the 21st century. The book concludes with a firm plea for leading with integrity.

Because all the chapters are uniformly helpful and interesting, it is difficult to select a few for more detailed discussion. But perhaps the questions behind three that are more general than the rest should get a closer look.

First, what is the future of leadership? What may change and what may remain the same in the 21st century? It will still be a process rather than a position or a role or a set of characteristics. And it will still be about people. About getting them to do what a leader wants them to do, even when they might be inclined to do otherwise. And so it will still be about "encouraging, convincing, exhorting and motivating" them to do things they would not have done without a leader's intervention.

On the other hand, what will remain the same will be located in a changing environment. An environment in which "there will be far less concern with gender, religion, race or age" - leaders will have to have communication skills that can build and inspire multicultural and multinational teams - having effective communication skills will include knowing how to inspire people by using e-mail and video-conferences, as well as by using visualisations and simulations - the problem will not be the sheer volume of information, which will continue to increase exponentially - it will be not having technology driven tools for analysing, interpreting, synthesising and transforming that information into knowledge that can be used to do what must be done - an environment in which we still have to identify the problems leaders will have to deal with and the jobs for dealing with them have not yet been thought of!

Second, what does it mean to be in front? Goldsworthy begins his book with "a parable of the geese". It is about what happens in the V formation in which geese fly. It is an excellent summary of the chapter on what it means to be a leader. Being in the front is not a status position. It is hard work, because it means taking the buffeting of the wind. It is responsible work, because it means choosing the path the flock should follow. It requires intelligence, because it means knowing when to retire so that one's tiredness does not endanger the work that has to be done. And so, it means having an ego that is big enough and small enough. Big enough to step into a leadership position. Small enough to step down when one knows one has reached one's best-by date.

The chapter covers a point that is only hinted at in the parable. Leaders sometimes fail. More often than not "because they do not respond appropriately to a change in the situation". Either they do not recognise things have changed or they do not know how to respond to the change. Also worth reflecting on are Goldsworthy's examples of failure being a precursor to success. Two that stand out are Abraham Lincoln's two failures in business and six failures in state and national elections before becoming the President of the United States. The first children's book by Dr. Seuss - Theodor S. Geisel - was rejected by 23 publishers. The next one sold six million copies. In Winston Churchill's words: "Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm."

Third, what does it mean to be behind? To be a follower rather than a leader? Goldsworthy makes the interesting observation that good followers and good leaders have many of the same characteristics and skills. A difference that makes a difference is a different feeling for risk. Leaders like to feel it. Followers prefer to avoid it. Interestingly, good leaders need good followers more than good followers need good leaders. In other words, old-fashioned "can-do" managers are still as valuable as they are scarce.

So, what makes a good follower? As with leaders, integrity is not negotiable. Being street-smart is better than being book-smart. Best of all is a good combo of each. Good followers do not have to be driven. Instead, they sometimes have to be reined in: "They will take on extra work gladly, they will upgrade their skills and they do not have to be asked to solve problems."

Finally, an observation and a question that seldom find their way into books on leadership. Why do so few people aspire either to being leaders or to being followers? Goldsworthy notes that being a CEO - which is a status description - is not equivalent to being a leader - which is a job description. Strangely, he does not make the equivalent observation for those employed by the organization that employs the CEO. Being a worker or an employee - again, a status description - is not equivalent to being a follower - which, again, is a job description. And it can be argued that most people go to work, not to follow a leader, but to earn a living, preferably by receiving as much as possible for doing as little as possible. Perhaps this is a good thing. Perhaps it means that Marx and the Bible (Genesis, chapter 3) got it right. A workplace is a creature of alienation and sin, because there are more enjoyable things to do with one's life than to take it to work!

Be that as it may. Ashley Goldsworthy's love child of an affair between the theoretical and the practical is a thought provoking read. Although it was written primarily for business situations, it is for anyone - CEO, parish priest, school principal, vice-chancellor or dean or chair of an academic department - who wants to transform a status position into a leadership position.

James Moulder (plato@sims.com.au) is a retired teacher of business school academic who lives in Melbourne, Australia. His hobbies are theology and poetry.