Among our greatest leaders are those driven by impulses they cannot completely control - by lust. Lust is not, however, an abstraction, it has definition. Definition that, given the impact of leaders who lust, is essential to extract. This book identifies six types of lust with which leaders are linked: 1. Power: the ceaseless craving to control. 2. Money: the limitless desire to accrue great wealth. 3. Sex: the constant hunt for sexual gratification. 4. Success: the unstoppable need to achieve. 5. Legitimacy: the tireless claim to identity and equity. 6. Legacy: the endless quest to leave a permanent imprint. Each of the core chapters focuses on different lusts and features a cast of characters who bring lust to life. In the real world leaders who lust can and often do have an enduring impact. This book therefore is counterintuitive - it focuses not on moderation, but on immoderation.

"Bravo to Barbara Kellerman! Building upon a lifetime of scholarship and upon a popular course she has created at Harvard, Kellerman brings between the covers of a single volume the world's classic literature on leadership. Every thoughtful leader will find deep, rich rewards here." -- David Gergen, Director, Center for Public Leadership Harvard Kennedy School, Former Presidential Adviser Bolster your leadership literacy--and improve your performance as a leader or manager. Leadership, says author, leadership expert, and Harvard Professor Barbara Kellerman, "is all about what leaders should learn--but it is decidedly not, deliberately not, about what leadership education has lately come to look like." Instead, Leadership is a concise yet expansive collection of great leadership literature that has stood the test of time. As Kellerman makes clear in her extensive, authoritative commentaries, every single selection has had, and continues to have, an impact on how and what we think about what it means to lead. And every single one has had an impact on leadership as an area of intellectual inquiry--as well as on the course of human history. Part I of Leadership consists of writings about leadership: Lao Tzu--on how to lead lightly Plato--on tyrants and philosopher-kings Machiavelli--on the preservation of power In Part II, you'll find examples of what Kellerman uniquely identifies as writing as leadership--works and words that thanks to their persuasiveness and power, changed the world: Thomas Paine--Common Sense Elizabeth Cady Stanton--"Declaration of Sentiments" Rachel Carson--Silent Spring Part III presents leaders in action--individuals who seized the moment to captivate, motivate, and lead with their singular personal power to persuade: Abraham Lincoln--on war and redemption Elizabeth I--on gender and power Vaclav Havel--on the power of the powerless The selections themselves, each a classic of the leadership literature, together with Kellerman's expert commentary, make Leadership required reading for those who want to learn about, reflect on, and even apply the greatest leadership literature lessons, ever. Barbara Kellerman is the James MacGregor Burns Lecturer in Public Leadership at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, and Harvard Business Review, and she has appeared on CBS, NBC, NPR, and CNN. She is author and editor of many books on leadership, most recently Bad Leadership and Followership. Kellerman is ranked by Forbes.com as among the "Top 50 Business Thinkers" (2009), and by Leadership Excellence in the top 15 of 100 "best minds on leadership" (2008-2009).

The COVID-19 pandemic will forever be remembered as a pivotal event in American history. Written by one of the world's foremost experts on leadership and followership, this book centers on the first six months of the pandemic and the crises that ran rampant. The chapters focus less on the former president, Donald Trump, than on his followers: on people complicit in his miserable mismanagement of the crisis in public health. Barbara Kellerman provides clear and compelling evidence that Trump was not entirely to blame for everything that went wrong. Many others were responsible including his base, party, administration, inner circle, Republican elites, members of the media, and even medical experts. Far too many surrendered to the president's demands, despite it being obvious his leadership was fatally flawed. The book testifies to the importance of speaking truth to power, and a willingness to take risks properly to serve the public interest.

Leadership has never played a more prominent role in America's national discourse, and yet our opinions of leaders are at all-time lows. Private sector leaders are widely seen as greedy to the point of being corrupt. Public sector leaders are viewed as incompetent to the point of being inept. And, levels of trust in government have plummeted. As the title of this book conveys, leaders in America are experiencing hard times.
Barbara Kellerman argues that we focus on leaders, and even on followers, while ignoring an essential element of leadership: context. This book is a corrective. It enables leaders to track the terrain that they must navigate in order to create change. Rather than a handy-dandy manual on what to do and how to do it, "Hard Times" is structured as a checklist. Twenty-four brief sections cover key aspects of the American landscape. They trace evolutions and revolutions that have revised our norms, transformed our populations and institutions, and shifted our culture.
Kellerman's crash course on context reveals how significant it is to leadership. Clearer still is the fact that leadership is more difficult than it has ever been. It is context that explains why leadership is so fraught with frustration. And, it is context that makes evident why leadership will be better exercised if it is better understood. Calling out patterns that emerge from the checklist, Kellerman challenges leaders to do better. This fascinating read will change the way that all of us think about leadership, while compelling us to consider what it means for our future.

How is Saddam Hussein like Tony Blair? Or Kenneth Lay like Lou Gerstner? Answer: They are, or were, leaders. Many would argue that tyrants, corrupt CEOs, and other abusers of power and authority are not leaders at all--at least not as the word is currently used. But, according to Barbara Kellerman, this assumption is dangerously naive. A provocative departure from conventional thinking, Bad Leadership compels us to see leadership in its entirety. Kellerman argues that the dark side of leadership--from rigidity and callousness to corruption and cruelty--is not an aberration. Rather, bad leadership is as ubiquitous as it is insidious--and so must be more carefully examined and better understood. Drawing on high-profile, contemporary examples--from Mary Meeker to David Koresh, Bill Clinton to Radovan Karadzic, Al Dunlap to Leona Helmsley--Kellerman explores seven primary types of bad leadership and dissects why and how leaders cross the line from good to bad. The book also illuminates the critical role of followers, revealing how they collaborate with, and sometimes even cause, bad leadership. Daring and counterintuitive, Bad Leadership makes clear that we need to face the dark side to become better leaders and followers ourselves. Barbara Kellerman is research director of the Center for Public Leadership and a lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

Over the last 40 years, the leadership industry has grown exponentially. Yet leadership education, training, and development still fall far short. Moreover, leaders are demeaned, degraded, and derided as they never were before. Why? The problem is leadership has stayed stuck. It has remained an occupation instead of becoming a profession. Unlike medicine and law, leadership has no core curriculum considered essential. It has no widely agreed on metric, or criteria for qualification. And it has no professional association to oversee the conduct of its members or assure minimum standards. Professionalizing Leadership looks to a past in which learning to lead was the most important of eruditions. It looks to a present in which learning to lead is as effortless as ubiquitous. And it looks to a future in which learning to be a leader might look different altogether - it might resemble the far more rigorous process of learning to be a doctor or a lawyer. As it stands now, the military is the only major American institution that gets it right. It assumes leadership is a profession that requires those who practice it to be taught in accordance with high professional standards. Barbara Kellerman draws on the military experience specifically to develop a template for learning how to lead generally. Leadership in the first quarter of the present century is different from what it was even in the last quarter of the past century - which is why leadership taught casually and carelessly should no longer suffice. Professionalizing Leadership addresses precisely the problem of how to prepare leaders in accordance with professional norms. It provides the template necessary for transforming leadership from dubious occupation to respectable profession.

This collection of essays draws on writings from mythologists, sociologists, philosophers, historians, and political activists, to present perspectives on the techniques, philosophies, and theories of political leadership throughout history. The forty-three selections offer a broad range of thought and provide a uniquely comprehensive reference.

In Reflections on Leadership fifteen prominent leadership scholars pay tribute to James MacGregor Burns's book, Leadership, a classic in the field of leadership studies. The contributors address the puzzles and anomalies in his work, such as: the place of values in leadership; leadership as a casual factor in change; levels of analysis; interdisciplinary approaches to the study of leadership; the distance of his theory from everyday experience; the absence of gender and race, and more.

A pioneering contribution to the study of negotiation theory, this volume takes as its central organizing principle the thesis that national leaders are generally the key actors in international politics and conflict management. Therefore, the editors argue, efforts to contain, manage, and reduce international conflicts through negotiation will be significantly enhanced through the availability of detailed information about the leading players. The papers collected here are deigned to evaluate this hypothesis through a detailed analysis of the major national leaders during the events of June-September 1982 in Lebanon, which began with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and culminated in the establishment of an international peace-keeping force in West Beirut.