Gurus on Leadership: A Guide to the World's Thought-Leaders in Leadership
Gurus on Leadership: A Guide to the World’s Thought-Leaders in Leadership
Mark Thomas, Thorogood Publishing, 2006
Mark Thomas begins Gurus on Leadership by so painfully reminding us about the leadership dearth that is apparent after the fall of so many business icons such as Enron, WorldCom, Vivendi, and Skandia. Led by executive superstars, each one of these organizations has been plagued by greed, malice,and downright deceptive practices.
Do we really need to hear this again? Absolutely! Unless we remain aware of the ways in which leaders have taken successful organizations to ruin, we may find ourselves making the same mistakes and dealing with the same lack of integrity over and over again. There are simply too many people, families,towns, cities, and nations relying on good, honest, leadership to take us safely, and prosperously, into the future. This is the legacy leaders should leave, and this is the point that Thomas successfully makes in this book. He does it by helping us to understand who the “gurus” in leadership are, what are their backgrounds, what theory or theories of leadership they have espoused, and why.
Thomas’s choices include Adair, Bennis, Blanchard, Drucker, and most of the all-star leadership writers. He has, however, left out Bass and Greenleaf,two of the most prolific writers and researchers on leadership in this generation.
The author has given us an easy read that provides a fairly comprehensive understanding of almost everything you wanted to know about leadership theories. The book is not a compendium of strung-together articles or previously published book chapters by leadership authors; it is an analysis of each of their theories and practical applications from Thomas’s perspective.
Mark Thomas treats each guru, his theories, and his celebrity with a careful editor’s eye. He includes only information that seems relevant to an understanding of who the guru is and what he stands for. For the mentally organized and efficient reader, this is refreshing. However, for the technical reader, this may seem to lack depth of discussion.
The book provides a quick reference to basic leadership theories and their origins. It is an easy read, with a wealth of basic knowledge on leadership and the various perspectives in the marketplace. It is not comprehensive, but it is certainly worth the £14.99 or $23.95 that Thorogood Publishers is charging for this book. I commend Thomas on a well-thought-out, practical, and interesting overview of basic leadership theories.
Reviewed by James T. Walz, Azusa Pacific University, Azusa, California, USA.
A version of this review was originally published in Leadership &Organization Development Journal, Vol. 28 No. 2, 2007
