Leadership and the Job of the Executive

Good management skills alone won’t get executives and their organizations far enough. What is also needed is the seemingly indefinable, evanescent, quirky, and paradoxical quality called leadership. Leadership lies in the emotional side of management. It pumps life into organizations and gives meaning to management structures. Leadership is symbolic, charismatic, inspirational--no matter how it is defined, Barach and Eckhardt prove that it can be Ilearned R. Their book is thus a solidly researched, readable assessment of what leadership actually is, its various dimensions, its place among other necessary executive skills, and how it can be nurtured and propagated. With examples from the worlds of business, politics, sports, and the military and buttressed by sound academic studies, Barach and Eckhardt succeed in making the concept of leadership come alive and--of greatest value to organizations and their people--useful.

Barach and Eckhardt start by describing the emotional side of management, the paradoxical nature of leadership, and how it fits into the full set of executive responsibilities and skills. They go on to break leadership down into its 20 components. In chapters devoted to each component, they provide readers with well-documented descriptions of leadership’s characteristics: desire, decisiveness, vision, integrity, anchoring, following, kinship, caring, inspiring, listening, telling, mentoring. They reassemble the parts and show how leadership works in Washington, D.C. Closing with a detailed discussion of the 6 most important leadership issues that Barach has identified in his decade-long study of the topic, the authors offer readers an opportunity to discover issues familiar to them personally, how to analyze them, and make use of the results.

JEFFREY A. BARACH is Professor of Management at Tulane University’s A.B. Freeman School of Business. With a doctorate and M.B.A. from Harvard and numerous awards for teaching excellence since then, Dr. Barach specializes in business policy and strategy, family-owned firms, business ethics and leadership, and has published widely in the major journals and other publications serving the business community.

D. REED ECKHARDT is a prize-winning journalist with an M.B.A. degree from Tulane. He has worked for newspapers in Indiana, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Louisiana, and has special experience in, and awards for, editorial writing.