Leadership is not a gift. It is a process. And like any process, it can be learned, refined, and applied.
For centuries, the debate has persisted: are great leaders born or made? This book takes a clear position — one shared by Peter Drucker, Warren Bennis, and Plato himself. Leadership can be learned. And if it can be learned, it can be described. And if it can be described, it can be systematised into something a practitioner can actually use.
Leadership Now does exactly that.
Drawing on a comprehensive survey of leadership literature — from the classical philosophy of Plato's Republic to the rigorous empirical research of modern organisational science — David Tuffley presents a structured, process-driven model for leading complex teams in the demanding conditions of the contemporary workplace. At its heart is a practical Leadership Process Model, developed through doctoral research at Griffith University, that gives leaders at every level a coherent, evidence-based framework for action.
The book is organised around three interlocking domains. The Individual Process Group addresses the inner architecture of effective leadership: vision, integrity, intelligence, action-orientation, individualised consideration, and the disciplined art of managing by exception. These are not abstractions. Each is broken down into specific, observable behaviours with the kind of precision that separates a workable model from an inspiring speech.
The Team Process Group tackles the full lifecycle of team leadership — from structuring and recruiting to forming, developing, and sustaining high performance. Tuffley draws on decades of both industry practice and academic research to show how effective teams are not accidents of chemistry but the products of deliberate leadership decisions. The ten processes in this group give leaders a complete operational vocabulary for building and maintaining teams that deliver.
The Organisational Process Group addresses the often-neglected challenge of leading teams within larger organisational contexts: managing boundaries, sustaining collaboration, and balancing the competing demands of team identity and institutional alignment.
What distinguishes this book from the crowded field of leadership titles is its insistence on precision. Tuffley applies the rigour of software engineering process modelling — a discipline built on the principle that if you cannot describe what you are doing as a process, you do not yet understand it — to the oldest challenge in human organisation. The result is a leadership framework with the clarity and structure of an engineering specification and the wisdom of a lifetime spent studying how people actually lead.
The book pays particular attention to two of the most pressing leadership challenges of our time: the leadership of virtual teams dispersed across geographies and time zones, and the leadership of knowledge workers — highly capable, self-directed professionals who cannot be managed through authority alone but must be led through vision, credibility, and genuine understanding of their work.
Whether you are a project manager navigating the complexity of distributed teams, a senior leader seeking a systematic framework for development, or a student of organisational behaviour looking for a model grounded in both theory and practice, Leadership Now delivers a rare combination: intellectual rigour made practically useful.
Leadership, as Eisenhower observed, is the art of getting someone to do something because they want to do it. This book shows you, step by step, how that art is practised.
Lead with process. Lead with purpose. Lead now.
David Tuffley PhD is a Senior Consultant with the Software Quality Institute and a Lecturer in the School of ICT at Griffith University in Australia. Before academia, David consulted to public and private sector clients in Australia and the United Kingdom in software quality matters. David has published extensively in the academic literature on the topic of this book, and also widely in the commercial world of practical how-to guides for project managers and staff. He specialises in easy-to-read, practical guides for project staff seeking to become more effective leaders of their project.
