Leadership Without Easy Answers, Volume 465

Front Cover
Harvard University Press, 1994 - Business & Economics - 348 pages

The economy uncertain, education in decline, cities under siege, crime and poverty spiraling upward, international relations roiling: we look to leaders for solutions, and when they don’t deliver, we simply add their failure to our list of woes. In doing do, we do them and ourselves a grave disservice. We are indeed facing an unprecedented crisis of leadership, Ronald Heifetz avows, but it stems as much from our demands and expectations as from any leader’s inability to meet them. His book gets at both of these problems, offering a practical approach to leadership for those who lead as well as those who look to them for answers. Fitting the theory and practice of leadership to our extraordinary times, the book promotes a new social contract, a revitalization of our civic life just when we most need it.

Drawing on a dozen years of research among managers, officers, and politicians in the public realm and the private sector, among the nonprofits, and in teaching, Heifetz presents clear, concrete prescriptions for anyone who needs to take the lead in almost any situation, under almost any organizational conditions, no matter who is in charge, His strategy applies not only to people at the top but also to those who must lead without authority—activists as well as presidents, managers as well as workers on the front line.

 

Contents

Values in Leadership
15
To Lead or Mislead?
30
The Roots of Authority
51
Leading With Authority
69
Mobilizing Adaptive Work
71
Applying Power
103
On a Razors Edge
127
Falling Off the Edge
152
Creative Deviance on the Frontline
185
Modulating the Provocation
209
Staying Alive
235
Assassination
237
The Personal Challenge
252
Notes
281
Acknowledgments
331
Index
335

Leading Without Authority
183

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About the author (1994)

Ronald A. Heifetz is King Hussein bin Talal Senior Lecturer in Public Leadership and Founder of the Center for Public Leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.