Customer Reviews

Flexible Leadership: Creating Value by Balancing Multiple Challenges and Choices

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This book tells the reader more about manangement than about leadership, based on the trivial recognition that no perosn cannot exert successful leadership without having sufficient expertise in management. Ten years ago, when management titles "hyped", this book's title might have been Flexible Management: Prerequisites for successful entrepreneurship.
Benno D. Hoffmann

Lepsinger & Yukl have written a highly readable book that very effectively integrates the most recent and important research findings about effective leadership practices and competencies. The book provides a very useful, pragmatic framework for executives (and consultants who assess and coach leaders) -- it really offers a roadmap for balancing competing demands and trade-offs that are critical to success, and very effectively makes the point that one needs to consider processes and supporting systems -- in addition to behavioral skills, to ensure success. I especially like the way the authors emphasize what can and can't be learned about leadership, and how they resolve the historical debate about the relative importance of leadership vs. managership -- arguing effectively that "leaders need to be good managers, and managers need to be good leaders."

The Flexible leader finally demystifies the notion of leadership. In my work, I often hear that "leaders are born", and you're out of luck if you don't get the gene. Unfortunately this doesn't provide most of us with any guidance on how to be a better leader and manager. The Flexible leader provides a practical roadmap to the kinds of behaviors that make leaders successful. This isn't an esoteric, psychological look at the personality or charisma of great leaders; it's about what successful leaders do, say, and how they manage -- and those are things we all have control over. This book is empowering for those of us trying to learn how to be better leaders and managers. It is also chock full of potent case studies demonstrating that strong leadership throughout the organization, not just at the top, makes a successful company!