Another great, easy-to-read, and popular leadership book my company uses successfully for management development and training is strongly recommended: "The Leader's Guide: 15 Essential Skills."Important Subject, Good Book My advice is to purchase John Kotter's article that this book came out of from the Harvard Business Review. It's title is "What Leaders Really Do: How Leadership Differs From Management". The article covers the subject well enough and I do highly recommend it!! Very Important.
Of equal importance were the specific differences that he cited along with the examination of whether or not leaders were made or born. This is not the classical trait theory approach but is well reasoned and balanced. Lastly, Kotter specifies the type of scenarios which call for leadership competencies.
I recommend this book highly for anyone wanting to understand how leadership truly differs from management and how the two functions interrelate. Other leadership books seem to emphasize examples of great leaders without the research, balance, or depth of Kotter.
Leadership, Kotter clearly demonstrates, is for the most part not a god-like figure transforming subordinates into superhumans, but is in fact a process that creates change -- a process which often involves hundreds or even thousands of "little acts of leadership" orchestrated by people who have the profound insight to realize this. Building on his landmark study of 15 successful general managers, Kotter presents detailed accounts of how senior and middle managers in major corporations, in close concert with colleagues and subordinates, were able to create a leadership process that put into action hundreds of commonsense ideas and procedures that, in combination with competent management, produced extraordinary results.
This leadership turned NCR from a loser to a big winner in automated teller machines, despite intense competition from IBM. The same process at American Express and SAS helped businesses grow dramatically despite the fact that they were "mature" and "commodity-like." Kotter also shows how leadership turned around operations at P&G and Kodak; produced huge business successes at PepsiCo, ARCO, and ConAgra; and made the impossible occasionally happen at Digital.
Thousands of companies today are overmanaged and underled, John Kotter concludes, not because managers lack charisma, but because far too few executives have a clear understanding of what leadership is and what it can accomplish. Without such a vision, even the most capable people have great difficulty trying to lead effectively and to create the cultures which will help others to lead.