Leaders: A Timeless Classic Updated for the New Millennium
Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge by Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, has been hailed as one of the top 50 business books of all time by Stuart Crainer, writing in the Financial Times. Now, the authors have prepared a new edition of this seminal work for the 1990s and beyond; the second edition of Leaders is updated throughout, and features a new foreword and an important new chapter on the future of leadership.
Looking to the future, Bennis and Nanus predict that one of the most important challenges facing leaders in the twenty-first century will be the speed and pervasiveness of technological change. In the face of such change, organizations find themselves more and more composed of "knowledge workers," expert in specialized disciplines and demanding a high degree of independent responsibility. In the future, the leader of the organization must be able to manage successfully both rapid changes in technology itself as well as the organizational and structural development such changes bring to the organization.
Successful leaders will still master and display the same basic skills identified by Bennis and Nanus in the groundbreaking first edition of Leaders. Drawing on in-depth interviews with leaders from both the public and private sectors, the authors challenge traditional myths about leadership and show that it constitutes a set of skills that can be isolated, studied, and mastered. In Leaders, they describe how leadership differs from management; identify vision, communication, positioning, and "the creative deployment of self" as the key strategies employed by leaders; and show how leaders use those skills to empower others.
In this new edition, the authors have also expanded and amplified some of their key insights, including:
Leadership is about character
Leaders must create an organization that fosters intellectual capital
Leaders must display a passion to realize their vision
Leaders must be able to generate and sustain trust
Leaders are able to convince others to sign on to their vision
Leaders display a bias towards action
Through their careful and thorough revisions and through the addition of new insights and materials, Bennis and Nanus have ensured thatLeaders will continue to be one of the most influential works on the topic.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Warren Bennis, a Distinguished Professor of Business Administration and Founding Chairman of the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California, draws on over 40 years of experience as a bestselling author, a prestigious educator, renowned consultant, and award-winning visionary. During most of the 60s and 70s, Bennis was an innovative university administrator, serving as President of the University of Cincinnati for seven years. He has been an adviser to four U.S. Presidents, and has served as professor at such institutions as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard College, and Boston University. A recipient of eleven honorary degrees, Bennis has advised many Fortune 500 companies. He lives in Santa Monica, California.
Burt Nanus is Professor Emeritus of Management at the University of Southern California, where he served on the faculty from 1969 to 1994. While there, he founded the University's Center for Futures Research and served as its director for sixteen years. Prior to joining the University, he spent ten years in various managerial capacities at Sperry Rand Corporation, the System Development Corporation, and his own consulting firm, Planning Technology, Inc. He is the author of nine business books, six of them on leadership. He resides in Pacific Palisades, California.
