Leadership BS
Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time
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4.3 • 10 Ratings
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the 2015 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year
Best business book of the week from Inc.com
The author of Power, Stanford business school professor, and a leading management thinker offers a hard-hitting dissection of the leadership industry and ways to make workplaces and careers work better.
The leadership enterprise is enormous, with billions of dollars, thousands of books, and hundreds of thousands of blogs and talks focused on improving leaders. But what we see worldwide is employee disengagement, high levels of leader turnover and career derailment, and failed leadership development efforts.
In Leadership BS, Jeffrey Pfeffer shines a bright light on the leadership industry, showing why it’s failing and how it might be remade. He sets the record straight on the oft-made prescriptions for leaders to be honest, authentic, and modest, tell the truth, build trust, and take care of others. By calling BS on so many of the stories and myths of leadership, he gives people a more scientific look at the evidence and better information to guide their careers.
Rooted in social science, and will practical examples and advice for improving management, Leadership BS encourages readers to accept the truth and then use facts to change themselves and the world for the better.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"The leadership industry has failed," charges Stanford Business School professor Pfeffer in this lively critique of a professional discipline driven, according to him, not by wisdom or a desire to foster leadership, but by money. Its precepts, he writes, are "based more on hope than reality, on wishes rather than data, on beliefs instead of science." Pfeffer sets out to help his readers rethink leadership by focusing on the root causes of failures in business leadership. Pfeffer counsels readers to look away from the "inspiration and fables" that glut the market, and to accept that some of those truisms are fallible: authenticity can be overrated, and honesty is not always the best policy for leaders. Pfeffer has taken on an ambitious project, given the uniformity of current thinking on business success, but his bluntness should go a long way toward slaughtering the sacred cows of the leadership industry. This is an entertaining and inspiring read for anyone looking to shake things up at work.
Customer Reviews
Eye opening for readers of Leadership books
This is the only book out of several hundreds of leadership books I have read that challenges the industry. This has allowed me to see the other side of the coin. The dirty side of the coin. All these years I have been studying the concept of leadership. This book goes deep into the actual practice of leadership without sugar coating it. I must say that having worked in my career for thirty years and now as a manager. This book is how things really work.