What's the matter with Leadership?
In spite of the dedication to developing good leaders, bad leadership continues like a plague. Not necessarily corrupt or evil leadership, but the ubiquitous types of bad leadership such as incompetent, rigid, intemperate, and callous leadership. Worse, we seem to be suffering from a crisis of confidence in our political, government, enterprise, and community leaders who are charged with leading wisely and well. Barbara Kellerman is the James MacGregor Burns Lecturer in Public Leadership at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. In her book, "The End of Leadership" she writes, "the leadership industry is self-satisfied, self-perpetuating, and poorly policed... by and large these are trying times, in which the leadership class has not exactly distinguished itself". Kellerman points out that there seems to be a fundamental disconnect between our idea of the leader as a central figure in our collective consciousness and th...