The Greats On Leadership: Classic Wisdom for Modern Managers

You don’t need a big title or a business degree in
order to lead with impact. What you need is practical
wisdom: the insight, judgment, and strength of
character that all great leaders have, but that most
business schools and corporate workshops don’t
teach. The Greats on Leadership gets you there.

Jocelyn Davis takes you on an in-depth tour of the
best leadership ideas of the past 25 centuries,
featuring classic authors from Plato to Winston
Churchill, Shakespeare to Jane Austen, C.G. Jung to
Peter Drucker, and many more. In a style both
thought-provoking and entertaining, she shows how
history’s great writers have always been, and still are,
the real leadership gurus.

Davis spells out the behaviors that distinguish true
leaders from misleaders and covers 20 specific
leadership topics, including:

Leadership Traps (Shakespeare)
Change (Machiavelli)
Power (Sophocles)
Dilemmas (Madison, Hamilton)
Communication (Lincoln, Pericles)
Personality Types (Jung)
Motivation (Frankl)
Judgment (Maupassant, Melville, Austen, Shaw)
Character (Churchill, Plutarch, Shelley, Joyce)

Each chapter begins with a synopsis of a great work
by the author and then draws out the key leadership
insights, weaving them together with business
examples, the best contemporary research, and tools
to help put it all into practice.

In the last two chapters
Davis presents a new way to think about leadership
levels, framing them in terms of the impact you have
rather than the title on your business card.

Whether you’re a recent graduate or MBA searching
for something more inspiring than the standard
textbook, a new manager looking for something
deeper than the typical how-to book, or an
experienced executive seeking ideas to lift you to the
next level, this remarkably readable and practical
guide will set you on the road to becoming a great
leader.