New Horizons for Learning: Lifelong Learning

Dee Dickinson's Suggested Readings on Leadership

Has there ever been such a time of need for leaders with vision, integrity, and wisdom? Following are some books with interesting and useful perspectives on this important skill. As a preface, following is a quotation from Dr. Howard Gardner's new book, Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership, Basic Books paperback, 1996:

A leader is an individual (or, rarely, a set of individuals) who significantly affects the thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors of a significant number of individuals. Most acknowledged leaders are "direct"; they address their public face-to-face. But I have called attention to an unrecognized phenomenon--indirect leadership: In this variety of leading, individuals exert impact through the works that they create.
Whether direct or indirect, leaders fashion stories--principally stories of identity. It is important that a leader be a good storyteller, but equally crucial that the leader embody that story in his or her life. When a leader tells stories to experts, the stories can be quite sophisticated; but when the leader is dealing with a diverse, heterogeneous group, the story must be suficiently elemental to be understood by the untutored, or "unschooled," mind.

The Drucker Foundation, ed. Hesselbein, Goldsmith, and Beckhard, The Leader of the Future. New York: Jossey-Bass, 1996.

Howard Gardner, Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership. New York: Basic Books, 1996.

Ronald Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers. Cambridge: Cambridge Press, 1994.

Joseph Jaworski, Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1996.

Margaret Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science: Learning About Organization from an Orderly Universe. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1994.

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