An Anatomy of Leadership

   Stories guide us in the conduct of our lives and in our beliefs.

   Life is partly a matter of deciding which stories are most in tune with reality and with our experience, and that means deciding which stories are in tune with our times and times beyond our time.

   One of the most important things leaders do, Howard Gardner says, is relate stories. Much of their effectiveness comes from the power of their stories and the extent to which their own life embodies that story.

   In Leading Minds, Gardner examines the lives of 11 men and women from the last century. In this fascinating study he seeks to isolate the elements of leadership found in individuals operating in vastly different areas.

   Gardner starts with the most basic elements of our primate heritage--the existence of dominance hierarchies and our proclivity to imitate--and from these rudimentary beginnings he builds his theory of leadership.

   There are a great number of books, articles, and workshops dealing with leadership. Howard Gardner's book outshines nearly all of them.

   The individuals profiled are Margaret Mead, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Robert Maynard Hutchins, Alfred P. Sloan Jr., George C. Marshall, Pope John XXIII, Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., Margaret Thatcher, Jean Monnet, and Mahatma Ghandi.

From Leading Minds, an Anatomy of Leadership

--"Leaders achieve their effectiveness chiefly through the stories they relate."

--"In recent times two factors have combined to complexify, in fascinating ways, the communication of stories from leaders to their groups. The first has been the proliferation of technological media… The second has to do with the construction and manipulation of the image of the leader."

--"A tension will always exist between those who use their knowledge to manipulate and those who use their knowledge to empower."