a triarchy press publication
Leading from example: A short guide to the lessons of literature by Peter Villiers
Publication Date: 14 July 2011
No. of Pages: 168
Book Type: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-908009-35-7
List Price: £20
Offer Price: £17.50
How could reading literature be of practical benefit to a busy, modern manager or leader? Surely a leader's reading should be of business reports and financial statements, not fiction! This book shows us how misguided such a view would be.
Indeed, the aim of Leading from Example is to help the reader to perform more effectively in his or her sphere of influence. This book is intended to stimulate reflective practice and to extend it beyond personal experience to learn from the experience of others. Those others include people who exist purely in the sympathetic imagination of the writer.
The process of falling for a character, becoming irrevocably intrigued and sympathetic, seems out of place in organizational life, where it must be juxtaposed with the norms of bureaucratic impersonality. But most organizations are awash with gossip and storytelling, much of it scurrilous. When people spend time talking about what is going on behind the closed doors of the management meeting, or what motivates their leaders, or speculating about the outcomes of a current change programme, they are creating fictions, and using them to conjure a place for themselves as both authors and characters in a constantly woven narrative.
So when we read compelling works of fiction, we immerse ourselves in processes not so different from those of normal organizational life. The predicaments are perhaps more carefully selected, and the inner lives of the characters more exposed to our gaze. This is especially important for those interested in leadership, because in fiction, and particularly the stories included in Leading from Example, we come to see how the situations that people get themselves into are seldom a matter of mere happenstance, but are intimately connected to the kinds of people they are. At the same time, who they become is revealed as bound up in their circumstances. How much more satisfying this is, than the dry lists of leadership skills and virtues with which we are all too often regaled!
In Leading from Example Peter Villiers teases out lessons for leadership using a diverse yet coherent set of readings from, among others:
- Rudyard Kipling (Kim, Stalky & Co., Captains Courageous)
- Jack London (The Sea Wolf)
- Ernest Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls)
- Joseph Conrad (The Secret Agent)
- George Orwell (Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four)
- R C Sherriff (Journey's End)
'Leadership is like a prism, projecting individual characteristics onto the big screen of organisational and public life. But what drives people into leadership, and the choices they make? Great novels illumine the motives and human stories of leaders in ways that are impossible by mere science, with its obsession for what can be modelled and measured. In Peter Villiers' excellent book you will find full-blown characters in all the complexity of their circumstances, facing dilemmas that are immediately recognisable. Anyone with experience of leadership will find the resonance far more instructive than any number of 'how to be a leader' text books; and it's a lot more fun too!'
Professor Jonathan Gosling, Director of the Centre for Leadership Studies, The University of Exeter
About the Author
Peter Villiers served in the army and merchant service and began to publish on leadership, ethics and human rights when a tutor at the national police staff college at Bramshill in Hampshire. His publications include biographies of Joseph Conrad, and of Gavrilo Princip, the assassin who started the First World War. He lives in Devon.
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