Leading Quietly (Hardcover)

by Joseph L. Badaracco Jr. (Author) "QUIET LEADERS ARE REALISTS..." (more)
Key Phrases: quiet leaders, complicated motives, organizational capital, Rebecca Olson, Aimes Center, Frank Taylor (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
When we think of great leaders, it's usually the charismatic, globally influential Churchill, Patton, Jack Welch who spring to mind. But as Harvard Business School professor Badaracco (Defining Moments: When Managers Must Choose Between Right and Right) correctly points out, everyday leadership is not so dramatic, and daily leadership decisions are rarely carried out at the top of an organization. Badaracco focuses here is on helping the middle- and senior-level managers who make the ordinary decisions that ultimately determine an organization's success. As he puts it: "What usually matters are careful, thoughtful, small, practical efforts by people working far from the limelight. In short, quiet leadership is what moves and changes the world." Out of a four-year study of these real-life leaders, Badaracco describes eight strategies for making effective leadership decisions in murky situations where the "right" thing is far from obvious. The strategies range from the commonsensical (truly examine the question at hand; don't ignore corporate politics) to the counterintuitive (don't expect to be wholly altruistic and accept that some of your motives are self-interested; try not to make important decisions as quickly as possible). Badaracco presents each principle with a brief introduction, followed by a case study and summary of the lessons to be learned. The sum is a useful checklist middle-level managers can put to work immediately.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review
Leading Quietly is a fresh approach to making our way in the world. -- USA Today, June 24, 2002

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business School Press; 1 edition (February 11, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1578514878
• ISBN-13: 978-1578514878
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #191,614 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

59 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Too Often Unsung Quiet Leadership, April 1, 2002

By	Serge J. Van Steenkiste (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

In Leading Quietly, Joseph L. Badaracco observes that society tends to think about leadership primarily in terms of heroic figures. His readers have been taught from their childhood to show respect for the efforts and sacrifices of great men and women. Often, his readers are not properly informed about the fact that most sung heroes like Winston Churchill or Mother Teresa worked, quietly and patiently, for years or decades, before their key contribution to society was widely acknowledged.

To his credit, Badaracco celebrates modest, unassuming men and women with their mixed and complicated motives. Like most of his audience, those men and women will probably never be in the limelight but make the world a better place through countless, small, often unseen efforts. Badaracco convincingly demonstrates that it is given to almost all his audience to learn and practice the simple virtues of quiet leadership, e.g.: Restraint, modesty, and tenacity.

Contrary to some wisdom, quiet leaders
1) Buy time.
2) Drill down into the political and technical elements of the problems they face.
3) Invest their political capital wisely.
4) Nudge, test, and escalate gradually.
5) Find ways, when necessary, to bend the rules.
6) View compromise as a high form of leadership and creativity.

In his recently published Good To Great, Jim Collins interestingly comes to the conclusion that the CEOs of great companies turning around good companies successfully are usually humble, modest, and tenacious. Is quiet leadership from top to bottom within any organization the future?

In a second edition of Leading Quietly, Badaracco could perhaps use both success stories and failures to illustrate each guideline for practicing quiet leadership. Often, failures are more valuable learning experiences than successes. Furthermore, Badaracco could perhaps further elaborate on white-collar criminality that can have an impact on quiet leaders as well. Quiet leaders at companies like Enron and Andersen could have been pressurized to violate the law and could eventually not simply walk away from their organizations because of their sense of duty and/or their responsibilities towards their family, especially in a downturn economy.

65 of 71 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Provocative and clearly argued, January 29, 2002

By	Jeffrey L. Seglin "Seglin" (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Professor Badaracco acknowledges here what conventional wisdom on business ethics might suggest before he presents a well-argued case for why the stock responses that call for black and white behavior are not always the most effective options for individual choices. Badaracco's take that the quiet leader doesn't knee-jerkingly draw a line in the sand and say, "this is right; this is wrong; I will not cross this line" might strike some readers as coping out or compromising at the expense of doing the absolute right thing. But careful readers will discover that Badaracco's notion isn't to cave when right action is called for, but rather to look more broadly at the issues and make more informed decisions. Main strengths: 1) provocative, well-articulated argument; 2) clarity of writing; and 3) clear case studies to support argument of the book.

45 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Scary Book, September 5, 2002

By	"mchamber40" (Lee's Summit, MO United States) - See all my reviews

I was very disappointed in this effort from a Harvard Business School professor. Not only did I think that this book would deal with the ethics of leadership, I also was expecting to read about success stories of leaders. Although the stories presented do show some of the elements that leaders can use to accomplish things quietly, the reader is left hanging as to what long term impact is felt from the decisions made. For example, the first story used is of a new hospital administrator who faces a difficult situation and resolves it using the techniques of a quiet leader,ultimately leading the second in command to tender his resignation. The disappointment is that we never find out if the administrator has lost the ability to lead those left behind or what other long term impacts there are to this type of leadership.

All of the other vignettes follow the same pattern, with no long term follow up on the effectiveness of these leaders, and how they dealt with other leadership challenges that arise in the future. This is also shown in the story of a new Army captain who reports a lapse on the part of inspectors, which is greeted by superiors with a "That is good to know", and then we never find out what changes are made to improve the situation, or if the captain is labeled by superiors as someone not to trust, or, hopefully, as someone with strong character.

However, what scared me most about this book was the chapter entitled "Buy a Little Time". In this chapter the author reflects that "But if he must choose between creative accounting and firing people unfairly, Williams may need to depart from highest standards of accounting precision and play some of the games that managers often play." (p. 67) As would be rather obvious to most, this sounds like the path that certain corporations have recently taken with disastorous results (See Enron - {"Accounting of several transactions 'is creative and agressive but no one has reason to believe that it is inappropriate from a technical standpoint..." Quote from Vinson & Elkins law firm regarding potential financial wrongdoing at Enron as quoted in the Wall Street Journal 1/16/2002, p. A18}). It is this "stretching" of the rules that is too often used to explain what most would consider unethical or immoral behavior. It scares me to think that recent and future graduates of the "premier" business school in the country are being given this type of guidance in business ethics.