The Future of
Leadership
by Warren Bennis, Gretchen M. Spreitzer adn Thomas G.
Cummings
*****
“Festschrift” is a German term for a
volume of essays contributed by colleagues as a tribute
to a scholar. About a year ago, a
“festschrift” to honor Warren Bennis was
hosted by the Department of Management and Organization
at the Marshall School of Business at the University of
Southern California of which Bennis is the founding
chairman. It included a day-long conference followed by a
banquet attended by more than 400 of his friends and
colleagues. Here in this volume are the essays written
for that special occasion. Gretchen M. Spreitzer and
Thomas G. Cummings have done a brilliant job of
co-editing the material, contributing an essay of their
own. They and other authors respond to one or more
questions which “keep him [Bennis] awake at night
and challenge his intellect and curiosity.” This
first chapter, “The Future Has No Shelf
Life,” is written by Bennis and addresses several
key questions about leadership in the next 10 years, what
new leaders will look like and the role of the next
generation.
Their primary audience consists of
tomorrow’s leaders. In 2001, some are infants,
others are completing college or have recently embarked
on careers and still others now occupy middle management
levels. Think of the book as a literary time capsule.
Those of us who examine the contents now can re-examine
them in 2010. It will be interesting to learn which
observations prove prescient and which do not.
All of the essayists are experts on their
respective subjects. The material is carefully organized
within six parts: “Setting the Stage for the
Future, The Organization of the Future, The Leader of the
Future, How Leaders Stay On Top of their Game, Insights
from Young Leaders and Some Closing Thoughts” which
includes Bennis’ “Postlude: An Intellectual
Memoir.” It remains for each reader, of course, to
determine which essays have the greatest immediate value.
All are so well-written that I suspect each will have
special value at some point between now and
2010—perhaps beyond.
My Favorites
My personal favorites include the two essays by Bennis
which serve as book-ends, as well as Handy’s
“A World of Fleas and Elephants,” Kouzes and
Posner’s “Bringing Leadership Lessons from
the Past to the Future,” Lipman-Blumen’s
“Why Do We Tolerate Bad leaders? Magnificent
Incertitude, Anxiety and Meaning”,
O’Toole’s “When Leadership Is an
Organizational Trait,” and Spreitzer and
Cummings’ “The Leadership Challenges of the
Next Generation.”
It seems most appropriate to conclude this
commentary with a brief excerpt from Bennis’ own
remarks in the book’s final chapter. After briefly
reviewing the last 20 years of his career, he focuses
specifically on the dynamic “Spirit of Place”
which, in his opinion, Southern California, the Los
Angeles area and USC now have. He cites their “rich
variety of population, economic enterprise and social
functions,” adding that, “diversity endows
them with resilience and the gift of maintaining identity
in the midst of endless changes. Perhaps this is all an
elegant justification for why these past 20 years have
been, for me, so alive, so absorbing and so invigorating,
who knows. But I want to add something to what I said
earlier—it isn’t only history that favored my
career, it’s also geography, the spirit of the
place.” Bennis is himself endowed with
“resilience and the gift of maintaining identity in
the midst of endless changes.”
Whatever the future of leadership proves to
be, it will have been guided and enriched by Warren
Bennis, as well as by those who honor him with the essays
assembled in this book.
Reviewed by Robert Morris,Independent Management
Consultant, Dallas, Texas.
The Future of Leadership, Warren Bennis, Gretchen M.
Spreitzer and Thomas G. Cummings, 2001, Jossey-Bass
Publishers, San Francisco, CA. ISBN
0-787-95567-1.
Book
Ratings:
*****
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August 2001 News for a
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