Practising Leadership: : Principles and applications

Citation

Walton, M. (1998), "Practising Leadership: : Principles and applications", Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol. 13 No. 1/2, pp. 121-121. https://doi.org/10.1108/jmp.1998.13.1_2.121.5

The notion of this book is quite clever: to look at leadership as a journal and to use a “map of the terrain” as the means through which to consider different aspects of this complicated and hugely important notion. While the idea is good I found its implementation delivered less than I had expected resulting in a book that covers a lot of ground but somewhat superficially.

Leadership is considered with respect to:

1. 1.

   contemporary perspectives;

2. 2.

   pre‐industrial paradigms of leadership;

3. 3.

   the disciplinary roots of leadership;

4. 4.

   modern leadership theories;

5. 5.

   the leader as hero; and

6. 6.

   leadership in the twenty‐first century.

Each of these chapters draws on some of the relevant contributors to the aspect of leadership and management in organisations. The result is quite a dense and, I found, quite fragmented book. This led me to feel unsatisfied because of the generally brief and far too superficial extracts given from some of the most profound thinkers in the field.

It may be that the authors became too concerned to pack in too much material so that, unless they were to produce a 1,000 page tome, they had to alight on the topics and perspectives covered very briefly.

Though the content is relevant and useful, and serves as a superficial reminder of many key points it will not have a place for me as a key source book, or as an explanation of difficult and interesting concepts. This might be an example of an end result achieving somewhat less than the sum of the parts.