The Powers to Lead
 | Oxford University Press, USA, 2008, Kindle Edition |
|---|
What qualities make a leader succeed in business or politics? In an era when the information revolution has dramatically changed the playing field, when old organizational hierarchies have given way to fluid networks of contacts, and when mistrust of leaders is on the rise, our ideas about leadership are clearly due for redefinition.
With The Powers to Lead, Joseph S. Nye, Jr. offers a sweeping look at the nature of leadership in today's world, in an illuminating blend of history, business case studies, psychological research, and more. As he observes, many now believe that the more authoritarian and coercive forms of leadership — the hard power approaches of earlier military-industrial eras — have been largely supplanted in postindustrial societies by soft power approaches that seek to attract, inspire, and persuade rather than dictate. Nye argues, however, that the most effective leaders are actually those who combine hard and soft power skills in proportions that vary with different situations. He calls this smart power. Drawing examples from the careers of leaders as disparate as Gandhi, Churchill, Lee Iacocca, and George W. Bush, Nye uses the concept of smart power to shed light on such topics as leadership types and skills, the needs and demands of followers, and the nature of good and bad leadership in terms of both ethics and effectiveness. In one particularly instructive chapter, he looks in depth at contextual intelligence — the ability to understand changing environments, capitalize on trends, and use the flow of events to implement strategies.
Thoroughly grounded in the real world, rich in both analysis and anecdote, The Powers to Lead is sure to become a modern classic, a concise and lucid work applicable to every field, from small businesses and nonprofit organizations to nations on the world stage.
Title: The Powers to Lead
Sales Rank: 9658 in Books
Author: Joseph S. Nye
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA, 2008-03-03, Kindle Edition, 240 pages
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- Joseph Nye's latest book on the leadership question seems superfluous and perhaps time wasting. It is not wise to tread a domain where the unknown and uncertain factors preponderate and things are less deterministic. Good leaders can be created in the areas of business management but not in the domain of politics. Alexander the Great or Caesar hardly had any theoretical… More reviews
- Apt Analysis
- Joseph Nye's newest book, The Powers to Lead, is as crucial to the application of leadership in the twenty-first century as an understanding of the technical and social evolution of the last ten years is to its success. This compound simile is more than a poignant summary of his work; it's a framing of the very research question Nye articulates as his motives for writing it: What is required… More reviews
- The skills effective and ethical leaders need to attract followers and achieve a group's objectives
The last time I checked, Amazon offers more than 56,000 books on subject of leadership in business. So, what does Joseph Nye offer in this book that makes a significant, indeed unique contribution to our understanding of why some leaders are so successful and many others aren't? Responding to that is the focus of the remarks that follow in this review.
- Superb Mix of Scholarship & Pragmatism
- Anything by Joe Nye stops my work and receives my undivided attention. This is an absolute gem of a book, a mix of world-class scholarship and world-class pragmatism. It goes to the top of my leadership list on Amazon.
The book opens with the observation that two thirds of US citizens believe their is a leadership crisis. The intellectual center of the book is its focus on "smart power" defined… More reviews
