The Guru Guide: The Best Ideas of the Top Management Thinkers: The Best Ideas of the Top Management Thinkers - Softcover

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JOSEPH BOYETT and JIMMIE BOYETT are cofounders and partners of Boyett & Associates, an Atlanta-based business consulting and research firm, and coauthors of the bestselling Beyond Workplace 2000: Essential Strategies for the New American Corporation.

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"A savvy guide to the ideas driving business conversation."-Fast Company

The one book you need in your drive to succeed If you're striving to make your mark in the business world, you don't have time to read all of the business books that hit the bestseller list- but you do need the essential information they contain. You need to keep up with the latest business trends and understand emerging ideas and new terminology. You need concise, penetrating explanations of today's most advanced thinking on business management and leadership. You need The Guru Guide(TM).

In this easy-to-use primer, two internationally respected business consultants provide an executive summary of the most effective and successful management ideas put forth by the leading business thinkers and doers of our time: Warren Bennis, Stephen Covey, Peter Drucker, Michael Hammer, Peter Senge, Margaret Wheatly, and many more. They also give you:
* Clear explanations of essential business terms, concepts, and theories
* Profiles of more than 75 top management figures and their ideas
* Cross-links to issues on which these gurus agree and disagree
* Insightful commentaries and real- world case studies
* Quick-reference charts, bulleted lists, chapter summaries, and other creative quick-learning tools

To make the most of the powerful ideas that can brighten your business future, start reading The Guru Guide(TM) today.

"It's tough to keep up with the latest management thinking. This book can help . . . and stimulate you to go to original sources of the greatest value."-Joseph B. White, Dean, University of Michigan Business School

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"A savvy guide to the ideas driving business conversation."-Fast Company

The one book you need in your drive to succeed If you're striving to make your mark in the business world, you don't have time to read all of the business books that hit the bestseller list- but you do need the essential information they contain. You need to keep up with the latest business trends and understand emerging ideas and new terminology. You need concise, penetrating explanations of today's most advanced thinking on business management and leadership. You need The Guru Guide(TM).

In this easy-to-use primer, two internationally respected business consultants provide an executive summary of the most effective and successful management ideas put forth by the leading business thinkers and doers of our time: Warren Bennis, Stephen Covey, Peter Drucker, Michael Hammer, Peter Senge, Margaret Wheatly, and many more. They also give you:
* Clear explanations of essential business terms, concepts, and theories
* Profiles of more than 75 top management figures and their ideas
* Cross-links to issues on which these gurus agree and disagree
* Insightful commentaries and real- world case studies
* Quick-reference charts, bulleted lists, chapter summaries, and other creative quick-learning tools

To make the most of the powerful ideas that can brighten your business future, start reading The Guru Guide(TM) today.

"It's tough to keep up with the latest management thinking. This book can help . . . and stimulate you to go to original sources of the greatest value."-Joseph B. White, Dean, University of Michigan Business School

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Chapter 1: Leadership

We begin this book with perhaps the most popular topic in all of business literature-leadership. Every business guru, it seems, has written at least one book and/or a collection of articles on the topic. Even when the topic isn't specifically leadership, but something else, such as managing diversity, managing change, total quality, reengineering, or strategy, a sizable portion of the narrative comes down to how and why people lead the particular effort under discussion or fail to do so. Leadership is the catchall subject of business discourse, but perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised.

People have been arguing about and writing about leaders and leadership for at least 2,000 years. Even the Bible contains an opinion. For example, Matt. 15:14 warns that "if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch," which, by the way, is good cautionary advice for those who want to learn how to lead by following the advice of some of our leadership gurus.

It is easy to understand why so many gurus and aspiring gurus tackle the issue of leadership. Providing leadership wisdom has become a very lucrative occupation, with some of the best-known gurus earning more than $500,000 per month for dishing out advice. American corporations dole out an estimated $15 billion per year on training and consulting for their upand-coming leaders. As you might expect, that amount of money attracts a lot of interest in the leadership game and is responsible for the profusion of literature on the topic-including a lot of junk that can be found in books and articles purporting to reveal the 7, 8, 9, or 100 secrets somebody you may or may not have heard of knows about leadership. Faced with the enormous volume of writing, research, videos, multimedia, and executive short courses on leadership, and even after tossing out the obvious junk, we had to be selective in preparing this chapter. Consequently, we offer this disclaimer. Unlike two of our leadership gurus who claimed that after reading their book you will be "equipped with all of the information and answers you need to become an effective, inspiring leader" (emphasis added), we will say only that after you read this chapter you will be equipped with some of the most important information and answers about becoming a leader. We will start where most other writers on leadership have started for thousands of years-with the characteristics of leaders.

The Essential Characteristics Of Leaders

Almost all of our leadership gurus provide a list of attributes or characteristics that leaders do or should possess. These are the yardsticks against which the rest of us should be able to measure the mettle of our character and consequently our leadership potential. Throughout this chapter, we provide lists of leadership characteristics from the writings of some the bestknown gurus. We invite you to score your own leadership potential by checking off the characteristics, attributes, megaskills, and ingredients of leadership that you possess; but we warn you that the standards laid out by our gurus are stringent. We will begin with one of the best-known names in the leadership business-Warren Bennis. His list of basic leadership ingredients appears in Exhibit 1.1.

Bennis is a professor of business administration at the University of Southern California and the best-selling author of On Becoming a header and numerous other works on leadership. If anyone knows what it takes to be a leader, Bennis does.

We hope you have these basic ingredients. Now let's see if you have mastered the seven megaskills of leadership as outlined by Burt Nanus in The Leader's Edge (see Exhibit 1.2). Nanus is a professor emeritus of management at the University of Southern California's School of Business Administration, former director of research at USC's Leadership Institute, and coauthor with Warren Bennis of the 1985 business best-seller Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge.

Next, in Exhibit 1.3, we have a list of characteristics from James O'Toole, former vice president of the famous Aspen Institute, where many leaders have been trained. O'Toole was also a director of the Leadership Institute at USC.

Next we list Stephen Covey's seven habits of successful people and eight characteristics of principle-centered leaders. (See Exhibits 1.4. and 1.5.) Covey is the author of the best-selling book The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, in which he introduces the philosophy of peoplecentered leadership, and more recently Principle-Centered Leadership...