The Powers to Lead | 
| Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: EBooks
List Price: $21.95
Buy New: $9.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 3715
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 240
Dewey Decimal Number: 352.236
ASIN: B0013ZCNG0
Publication Date: March 3, 2008
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| Customer Reviews:
The skills effective and ethical leaders need to attract followers and achieve a group's objectives July 28, 2008
The last time I checked, Amazon offers more than 56,000 books on subject of leadership in business. So, what does Joseph Nye offer in this book that makes a significant, indeed unique contribution to our understanding of why some leaders are so successful and many others aren't? Responding to that is the focus of the remarks that follow in this review.
In Nye's opinion, insufficient attention has been paid to "the questions of power and leadership in a context broader than that of modern organizations." He goes on to assert that effective leadership requires "a mixture [and balance] of soft and hard power skills that I call [begin italics] smart power [end italics]. The proportions differ with contexts." To Nye, a leader can be - but need not be only a single -- individual that "helps a group create and achieve shared goals." Moreover, a leader is not only "who you are but what you do" and what a leader does frequently is determined by the given circumstances. If "context is more important than traits," the most effective leaders are those who help to achieve goals in (to borrow a phrase from Robert Bolt) "all seasons." Nye therefore views leadership as a process with three key components: leaders, followers, and context.
With regard to "soft" and "hard" power skills, they can be learned and they can be mastered. They enable a leader to respond most effectively to a given situation. "Soft power is not merely the same as influence, though it is one source of influence. After all, influence can also rest on the hard power of threats or payments. Nor is soft power just persuasion or the ability to move people by argument, though that is an important part of it. It is also the ability to entice and attract. Attraction often leads to acquiescence. In behavioral terms, soft power is attractive power. In terms of resources, soft power resources are assets - tangible and intangible - that produce such attraction." Nye acknowledges that leaders also rely on "hard power" in certain situations to help achieve the given objectives with threats, intimidation, and perhaps even punishment. "Hard and soft power sometimes reinforce and sometimes interfere with each other." In this context, I recalled numerous situations in films and television shows when the "good cop, bad cop" strategy was used to obtain information.
"Almost every leader needs a certain degree of soft power" and a leader and a tyrant are polar opposites. Neither soft nor hard power is either good or bad, per se, nor is one always better than the other. To repeat, the ability to combine hard power and soft power into an effective strategy is "smart power." As Nye explains, "Leadership, like power, is a relationship, and followers also have power both to resist and to lead. Followers empower leaders as well as vice versa." There are no leaders without followers but, that said, "the power of leaders depends on the followers' objectives that are embedded in their culture." These are among Nye's core concepts and they will encourage those who read his book to re-consider (if not revise) their own ideas about leaders, followers, and contexts.
After I read Nye's book, I re-read two written by Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi and Leading Minds in which Gardner discusses 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 Gandhi. All but Gandhi among those in the first volume are generally viewed only as thought leaders, not as social or political activists as are the subjects in the second volume. Their relationships with followers are also quite different. What can be said of all the leaders whom Gardner discusses is that each mastered both hard and soft skills but applied them in quite different contexts to achieve quite different objectives.
I am grateful, to Joseph Nye for his thought-provoking, at times counterintuitive perspectives on leaders, followers, and contexts. As a result, I have not only reconsidered my own opinions about those components in the power relationship, I have also reconsidered my perspectives on leaders throughout history, notably Julius Caesar, Joan of Ark, Abraham Lincoln, and Harry Truman.
Superb Mix of Scholarship & Pragmatism February 26, 2008
15 out of 15 found this review helpful
Anything by Joe Nye stops my work and receives my undivided attention. This is an absolute gem of a book, a mix of world-class scholarship and world-class pragmatism. It goes to the top of my leadership list on Amazon.
The book opens with the observation that two thirds of US citizens believe their is a leadership crisis. The intellectual center of the book is its focus on "smart power" defined as a balanced mix of soft and hard power that is firmly grounded in "Contextual IQ," a term credited to Mayo and Nohria of Harvard.
The author defines leaders as those who help a group create and achieve goals. He states that leadership is an art, not a science. I especially liked the early phases, "good contextual intelligence broadens the bandwidth of leaders." He likens the relation of leaders and the led to surfers and the wave--can ride it but cannot move it this way and that.
Soft power, his signal contribution to the global dialog on international relations, is concisely defined as att5ractive power, yielding the power to ask instead of compell. He cites McGregor Burns in communicating that bullys who humiliate and intimidate are counter-productive, that "power-wielders are not leaders."
There is a fine review of leadership styles, attributes, and a reference to female leadership rising (I have long said that women make better intelligence analysts because they have smaller egos and a great deal more emphathy and intuition). He provides a matrix for evaluationg inter effectivenesss and ethics in relation to goals, means, and consequences.
I was struck the emphasis on emotional intelligence and the needed ability to rapidly evaluate loyalty networks that might not be immediately obvious. He distinguishes between public politics and private politics.
The book concludes with a really extra-special and lengthy disucssion of leadership ethics and morality. The last two pages prior to top-notch notes and bibliographies are 12 take-aways on leadership (he had the wit to avoid making them the 12 commandments) consisting of a fragment that I list below, and explicative annotation that I do not--the book is worthy of buying for these two pages and the moral-ethical conclusion alone, but certainly this is an important book that should be read any anyone seeking to lead others.
1. Good leadership matters
2. Leadership can be learned.
3. Leaders help create and achieve group goals.
4. Smart leaders need both soft and hard power skills.
5. Leaders depend on and are partly shaped by followers.
6. Appropriate style depends on context.
7. Consultative style costs time, but has three major benefits.
8. Leaders need both managerial and organizational skills.
9. Leadership for crisis conditions requires advanced preparations, emotional maturity, and the ability to distinguish between operational, analytical, and political contexts.
10. Information revolution is shifting context of postmodern organizations from command to co-optive style.
11. Reality testing, constant information seeking, and adjusting to change are essential but (buy the book).
12. Ethical leaders use consciences, common moral rules, and professional standards, but conflicting values can create "dirty hands."
I have just two nits with this book, neither of which is a buy-stopper:
A. On page 94 there is an annoyingly facile and superficial reference to the 9-11 commission citing cultural dissonance as one reason the FBI and CIA did not share information. As one who has both read and written extensively on this topic, not only have we all identified numerous examples of internal failures (e.g. the FBI rejected two walk-ins, one in Newark and one in Orlando, prior to the event; CIA sent line-crossers in and conclusively established there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction, but George Tenet parked his integrity on the same shelf Colin Powell used, and let the White House lie 935 times to the public and Congress). I have an edited book scheduled on Cultural Intelligence for 2009, this is an important topic, and merits better treatment from the author.
B. This book could usefully be expanded, or followed by another book, to integrate the books I list below, and the world-changing conditions they represent.
The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition
Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
The 360 Degree Leader: Developing Your Influence from Anywhere in the Organization
The Knowledge Executive
The Collaborative Leadership Fieldbook
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
Five Minds for the Future
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace
Having said that, I consider this to be one of the author's top three immediately current and relevant books, and relatively priceless if we can get "Mr. Perfect" to read it (more than once), along with the author's two recent works, Understanding International Conflicts (6th Edition); and The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone.
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