Leading from Example

Imprint: Triarchy Press
Published: 2011
List Price: £20.00
Offer price : £12.50
Format: Paperback
Extent: 168pp.
Size: 15.3 x 23.0 cm
ISBN: 978-1-908009-35-7

Leading from Example:
A short guide to the lessons of literature
Peter Villiers

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Leading from Example:
A short guide to the lessons of literature
Peter Villiers

Practical lessons taken from classic literature for the busy leader.

In Leading from Example Peter Villiers teases out lessons for leadership using a diverse set of readings from:

Rudyard Kipling (Kim, Stalky & Co., Captains Courageous)
Jack London (The Sea Wolf)
Ernest Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls)
Joseph Conrad (The Secret Agent)
George Orwell (Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four)
R C Sherriff (Journey's End)

The book is intended to stimulate reflective practice and to extend it beyond personal experience to learn from the experience of others - including characters from great fiction.

The process of falling for a character, becoming irrevocably intrigued and sympathetic, seems out of place in organizational life, where it must be juxtaposed with the norms of bureaucratic impersonality. But most organizations are awash with gossip and storytelling, much of it scurrilous. When people spend time talking about what is going on behind the closed doors of the management meeting, or what motivates their leaders, or speculating about the outcomes of a current change programme, they are creating fictions, and using them to conjure a place for themselves as both authors and characters in a constantly woven narrative.

So when we read compelling works of fiction, we immerse ourselves in processes not so different from those of normal organizational life. The predicaments are perhaps more carefully selected, and the inner lives of the characters more exposed to our gaze. This is especially important for those interested in leadership, because in fiction, and particularly the stories included in Leading from Example, we come to see how the situations that people get themselves into are seldom a matter of mere happenstance, but are intimately connected to the kinds of people they are. At the same time, who they become is revealed as bound up in their circumstances.

Review

"Leadership is like a prism, projecting individual characteristics onto the big screen of organisational and public life. But what drives people into leadership, and the choices they make? Great novels illumine the motives and human stories of leaders in ways that are impossible by mere science, with its obsession for what can be modelled and measured. In Peter Villiers' excellent book you will find full-blown characters in all the complexity of their circumstances, facing dilemmas that are immediately recognisable.

Anyone with experience of leadership will find the resonance far more instructive than any number of 'how to be a leader' text books; and it's a lot more fun too!"
Professor Jonathan Gosling, Director of the Centre for Leadership Studies, The University of Exeter

Read a short April 2018 paper by Peter Villiers on R.C. Sherriff's Journey's End and so-called 'British values'. (Journey's End is the subject of Chapter 7 of Leading from Example.) View the paper here.