Patricia Pitcher

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The Drama of Leadership

Patricia Pitcher

Synopsis:
A passionate prescription for the future of leadership["I congratulate Professor Pitcher on her fascinating search for the 'truth' about power and its manifestations in organizations."--Abraham Zaleznik, Harvard Business School "...a critically important piece of work, tackled with a sophistication and elegance that is rare in management literature."--Henry Mintzberg, McGill University Witness to the collapse of a giant corporation, Patricia Pitcher set out to find out why it had to happen. She discovered a profound crisis in leadership grounded in a misunderstanding of the personalities and gifts of the company's executives and managers. Pitcher went on to conduct an eight-year study of fifteen other organizations. Her findings and recommendations offered in The Drama of Leadership are both startling and insightful. Pitcher paints the portraits of three types of leaders: The Artist is people oriented, open minded, intuitive, and visionary. The Craftsman is humane, dedicated, and wise. The Technocrat is detail-oriented, rigid, methodical, and bad news for the organization. How these three types of leaders interact is the drama played out in organizations everywhere. Whether the story ends as a tragedy or comedy is entirely up to what types of leaders get top billing. Challenging conventional wisdom, Pitcher argues that we've miscast the leaders in our organizations. Technocrats may bark the loudest but their limitations in terms of flexibility and creativity may mean curtains for organizations trying to compete today. Leaders aren't created in management seminars, they spring from natural talent pools. Pitcher debunks the myth that there is a dearth of real leaders explaining that we've just made the wrong selections and are losing the potential of artists and craftsmen who can turn things around. Pitcher helps readers identify what type of leader they are and shows how to interact with others to achieve success in their organization. The Drama of Leadership is a passionate appeal to develop the kind of leaders and organizations that can take us into the 21st century. PATRICIA PITCHER (Montreal, Canada) is a professor of leadership at Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales. She has also served as director of economics at the Toronto Stock Exchange and senior vice-president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses.

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Other editions: Hardcover - 1995