The Following review was contributed by: John Walsh:

To read John's Interview with the author  CLICK HERE.

Leadership is one of the more interesting and contested issues in the world today. Do we want leaders who involve us or and consult us and consider our opinions or do we want leaders to be strong individuals who go ahead and make decisions based on their judgement irrespective of dissenting views? Do we want leaders who believe they are inspired by God? Does it matter who our leaders are? A significant body of literature has grown up to examine these kinds of issues and much of it has been placed in the management genre. Further, much of the content and ideas inspiring leadership has been provided in one way or another by military experiences. Many of us will be familiar with looking around bookshops and seeing the works of authors promising to give us the leadership secrets of such as Genghis Khan, Lao Tsu or Winston Churchill. As a former US marine and a management consultant, Jim Stroup is well-placed to determine how much of this is valid and how much just puff and fluff designed to make a quick buck.

Stroup’s views, in summary, are that in the modern age organisations are increasingly complex phenomena which it is impossible and possibly dangerous to entrust to the leadership of one person – usually one man. No individual is qualified to manage such an undertaking and it is in any case inappropriate to expect that individuals, with all their foibles and inconsistencies, are really capable of meeting the expectations of idealism that we might come to think of by supposing that history is the tale of great men.

Instead, he writes, leadership is more efficiently managed through the kind of spontaneous and unheralded forms of leadership from deep within an organisation. Just as the advance of infantry across the battlefield depends on the prompting of a comparatively small number of individuals acting according to circumstances and their ability to seize the moment, so too do large organisations progress by the smaller stimuli provided by employees, technicians or administrators, within the organisation who are much closer to customers or to whatever constitutes the sharp-end of their business.

Jim Stroup develops an interesting and sophisticated approach to the issue of modern leadership and it is one that will be of use to all those interested not just in business but in thinking about the ways in which we need and value leaders in our lives. In Managing Leadership, he helps to integrate his ideas with the rest of the literature on this subject which makes this a very useful single volume primer on managerial leadership.