The Future of Leadership: Today's Top Leadership Thinkers Speak to Tomorrow's Leaders

Well written - concise with little wasted rhetoric. Excellent text: I would recommend it to anyone with more than basic knowledge of leadership principles.

This interesting work is a collection of essays by some of the world's most respected leadership thinkers. Contributors include Charles Handy, James O'Toole, Thomas Stewart, Tom Peters, Barry Posner and James Kouzes. These essays were first presented at a special conference held to honor Warren Bennis. Organizers labeled the conference a festschrift, a German word for a volume of essays assembled by colleagues to be a tribute to a renowned scholar. The essays were edited and divided into five parts: 1. Setting the Stage for the Future.2. The Organization of the Future3. The Leader of the Future.4. How Leaders Stay on Top of Their Game.5. Insights from Young Leaders. The result is an insightful examination on the state of leadership today and the challenges it can expect to experience in the future. For example, Bennis writes the first essay and presents a number of challenging issues, including the widening disparity of talent among income levels, growing demographic changes between young and old and balancing the demands of work and home. James O'Toole looks at the organization of the future and remarks that leaders should view their tasks "as creating the systems under which others would be encouraged to do all the things that typically end up on the desk of the do-it-all leader." The Future of Leadership is a comprehensive examination of leadership today and tomorrow provided by a number of insightful modern day thinkers. It asks some judicious questions and dares to look into the future with assurance and confidence. Some essays are better written than others, but every reader will find some valuable material and learn a new perspective from its pages.

The Germans call it a festschrift - a book stemming from the celebration honoring a renowned scholar, in this case Warren Bennis. The luminaries (including Bennis himself) who gathered in May 2000 at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business for this festschrift offer 19 thoughtful chapters on leadership issues. In fact, the consistent quality and creativity may pleasantly surprise you. The only exception is an imaginative, but shallow and self-absorbed clunker from Tom Peters. We [...] recommend this thought-provoking collection to students and practitioners of the mysterious art of inspiring others to follow.

This work is a tribute to Warren Bennis, a celebration of his career. In praising him, he challenged those around him to address issues that continue to interest and perplex him. And, despite his years of experience and two million books of his own in print, the questions that remain are often simple and profound.Answering these questions are top researchers, professors, commentators and consultants. The variety of authors provides a rich tapestry of information, experiences and opinions. What are the keys to great leadership? What makes one high-performing team do great things (The Manhattan Project) and another perpetrate evil (The Final Solution)? As the percent of one's life likely to be engaged in full-time employment declines (from 50 of 68 years in 1960 to 38 of 76 years today), how does this affect the way we lead and live? What happens when good leaders go bad? Is leadership aptitude widely distributed or possessed by a select few? Are business schools up to the task of developing the management and leadership talent for tomorrow?Given the approximately hundreds of articles and dozens of books on leadership published each year, you might expect to have had these answers or at least these questions raised before. "The future of leadership" offers a fresh, readable perspective, for the business student and the manager. Sure, you might quibble with the eclectic responses and styles of this broad spectrum of authors, but the quality lies in their diversity.