Articles

This page groups a selection of key articles into the following themes:

Critical Thinking on Leadership

These articles offer new thinking on leadership, showing how it can be shown bottom-up by innovative knowledge workers. This leads to a general definition of leadership: showing the way for others, either by example or by promoting a better way.

1. Leadership and Management Reinvented
2. Leadership in a Postmodern Age
3. The Ideal Leader
4. No Leaders No Managers
5. Microleadership
6. How Do YOU Define Leadership?
   
7. Leading by Example? How Odd!
8. Leadership vs Management
9. Four Images of Leadership
10. Creative Class Leadership
11. The Leader as Activist
12. Vision and Leadership
    
13. Leadership: NOT a Role
14. Leadership and Management as Functions

Rienventing Management

These articles show how management can be a positive, constructive function. Suitably upgraded, it can take much of the load of running organizations from leadership which, redefined, can only influence people, not make decisions for them or get work done through them.

1. Management Upgraded
2. 21st Century Management
3. Mintzberg on Management
4. The Effective Manager
5. No Leaders No Managers
6. Executives: Leaders or Managers?
   

Heroic Cultures and Employee Engagement

These articles argue that organizational cultures are too heroic and thus disengaging because executives want to do too much of the thinking, to score goals with brilliant solutions to problems. But this leaves employees feeling like passengers on the bus with no share in driving it or determining its direction.

1. A Hero at Work
2. Cultures of Disengagement
3. Four Levels of Employee Engagement
4. Creating an Engaging Culture
5. Taming the Alpha Male Leader
6. Is Leadership Feminine?

Success at Work

These articles relate to management skills and career success.

1. Should You Always Play to Your Strengths?
2. How to Engage Employees
3. How's Your Confidence Today?
4. Managing Employee Performance
5. Discovering your Career Path
6. What is an Effective Manager?
7. Engage Yourself!
8. Questions for Success
9. Collaborative Assertiveness
10. Celebrating Your Success

Gurus on Leadership and Management

Commenting on the leadership views of well known thinkers helps to clarify my own ideas.

1. Jim Collins on Leadership
2. John C. Maxwell on Leadership
3. John Kotter on Leadership
4. Heifetz on Leadership
5. Mintzberg on Management
6. Abraham Zaleznik on Leadership
7. Kouzes & Posner on Leadership
8. Warren Bennis on Leadership
9. Steven Covey on Leadership

Critique of Followership

These articles argue that it is disengaging to call employees followers. Those who challenge their bosses are not "courageous followers" but showing leadership upwards.

1. The Death of Followership
2. Followership is a Bastard
3. Beyond Leaders and Followers

Questioning Servant Leadership

These articles argue that servant leadership is not a distinct model of leadership. Like green or financial leadership, it's the usual way of leading applied to a certain set of values. For my latest thinking on servant leadership, see: No Servant Leaders and The Post-Heroic Manager.

1. The Post-Heroic Manager - a replacement for servant leadership - this and next article are my latest thinking on this topic.
2. No Servant Leaders - please read this one if no others.
3. Servant Leadership: A Bad Idea - my earliest thinking on this topic.
4. Against Servant Leadership 
5. No Leaders No Managers - this article complements "No Servant Leaders", saying there are no leaders at all, not just no servant leaders.