What is it about?
These essays are all written by well-known leadership scholars. Most explore the experience of leading and being led (being without leadership) as exemplified in famous novels, adventure stories, poems and plays. Some of the essays also suggest implications for the way we conceptualise leadership, and implications for mainstream leadership theory. But all the essays invite us to enjoy the fascination of studying leaders and their predicaments.
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Why is it important?
This approach to studying leadership allows us the pleasure of fine writing, feeds the curiosity and invites profound speculation about power, responsibility, accountability, desire and loss. These are undeniably integral to leadership, yet almost always excluded for the comparatively desiccated writing and reductionist approaches of most academic writing.
Perspectives
I think these essays tell us more about leadership than almost anything else I have read (or written) on the subject, because they allow very experienced scholars to bring their insight to bear on complex, irreducible situations, to exercise imagination as well as discrimination. Mostly, they present leadership as a complex human predicament, which I find so much satisfactory and thought-provoking.
Prof Jonathan R Gosling
Exeter University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Fictional Leaders, January 2013, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1057/9781137272751.
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