The Essence of Leadership: Explorations from Literature - Softcover

Manikutty, S; Singh, Sampat

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9356400377 ISBN 13: 9789356400375

Publisher: Bloomsbury India, 2022

Synopsis

Understanding leadership is really about understanding life, and this starts with gaining an understanding of the self. Traditional management approaches, based on ‘scientific’ analysis, cannot contribute much towards understanding leadership. This book shows how leadership can be better understood by reading and interpreting masterpieces of world literature, and relating them to leadership issues. The book starts with Cervantes’ masterpiece Don Quixote, whose main character asserts, ‘I know who I am’, and believes in himself. This is followed by other works to highlight important issues: ambition and purpose in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, faith vs. reason in Bertolt Brecht’s The Life of Galileo, awakening the human spirit in Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, authenticity in Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq, and the old Sanskrit play Mudra Rakshasa by Visakhadatta, leaders and society in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, the role of illusions in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, taking a stand in A Dolls’ House, the epic Mahabharata for development of perspective, and Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha for understanding the process of self­development and realisation of one’s potential. Based on the experience of the authors teaching a course on leadership for the last 20 years at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, this is an enlightening and illuminating read for both academicians and corporate leaders. Sales and Marketing Highlights The authors bring emotion to the center stage in management teaching: ‘Developing a comprehensive model that can deal with the complexity of higher order decision making requires, not only powers of analysis, but also understanding of emotions. The authors explain, with the help of examples from the lives of great leaders, as well as from literature, what vision is, and the passionate commitment to it, what character is (value anchors that produce consistent conduct) and how character develops, what is a holistic perspective, and how leaders manifest such a perspective, what is self-development, and how humanities can facilitate self-development.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury India
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9356400377
• ISBN 13: 9789356400375
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 338