The Living Leader: How Outstanding Leadership Can Transform Your Organization

Citation

Ferguson, P. (2007), "The Living Leader: How Outstanding Leadership Can Transform Your Organization", Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 15 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/hrmid.2007.04415eae.001

The Living Leader: How Outstanding Leadership Can Transform Your Organization

A round-up of the best book reviews recently published by Emerald.

The Living Leader: How Outstanding Leadership Can Transform Your Organization

Penny Ferguson, Infinite Ideas Company, 2006

The Living Leader describes the experience that Penny Ferguson has had over ten years of designing and facilitating a “personal leadership program”. The book contains, in the final chapter, a number of case studies, possibly testimonials illustrating how the author’s approach has worked in practice, written by people who have participated in her program.

The book should inspire existing and aspiring leaders to be different. It is not about what to do, but about how to be. This, of course, sets up the paradoxical state of needing to know what to do in order to be different. The chapter on listening, “Leaders listen”, illustrates the problem. The issue is not whether leaders listen, but how they listen. This is predicated on leaders wanting to listen and understanding the purposes and techniques of “incisive” questions – seeing listening, rather than telling, as the key leadership role.

Telling denies those who are led the responsibility for their own decisions. If they are doing what the leader tells them (implementing the leader’s decisions) the danger is that responsibility for anything that goes wrong will also be seen as the leader’s. That is covered in the chapter entitled “Communicate responsibility”.

The book is full of anecdotes and illustrations that enable the reader to see the value of thinking in one way, and the problems that come with thinking in another. There are occasional references to other authors – to Jim Collin’s Great to Good, for example. The chapter on developing the right people starts from Collin’s view that it is necessary to get the right people on the bus before setting off on the journey.

This is not an academic textbook; it reads more like an extended sermon. The extent to which the reader will be comfortable with this will depend in part on the extent to which his or her thinking is already attuned to Penny Ferguson’s message. The book communicates an ideal, but one that is achievable through personal development.

The danger is that a value-laden approach to leadership may induce a state of guilt in the reader. A bit like the problem of recycling and carbon emissions, a presentation of the ideal easily sets up a disabling guilt on the part of those who know what the right thing to do is, but who equally know they are not doing it. The book is about individual development and, only at the end, almost as an afterthought, is there a chapter on culture – that is, the collective. In fairness to Penny Ferguson, her book is aimed at those who lead the organization and hence who, as individuals, establish the culture. For those further down the hierarchy it may be more difficult to separate the individual from the collective.

Each chapter starts with a quote and a photograph linked to the quotation. The chapter on leadership style, for example, starts with a quote from Dwight D. Eisenhower:

Pull the string, and it will follow wherever you wish. Push it, and it will go nowhere at all.

My favorite quote from the book is “doing what you have always done, believing that you will get a different result, is a definition of madness” – a much starker version of a message usually associated with neuro-linguistic programming.

The Living Leader is easy to read and a good overview of a philosophy that equates with good practice for anyone in a leadership role.

Reviewed by Pete Sayers, University of Bradford, Bradford, UK.

A version of this review was originally published in Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 39 No. 2, 2007