Thursday, April 17, 2014

The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership: A Critical Perspective

I think a writer for the Guardian recommend the book: The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership: A Critical Perspective by Dennis Tourish. I managed to finish off reading it a couple of days ago. this was an interesting book about the cult of leadership in business. One of the reasons that many CEOs get huge salaries is because people claim that the CEO is the most important person  in a company. There are claims that the CEO can fundamentally change an organisation.

The book shows that many of the ideas of "leadership" are not just wrong, but dangerous. No one wants to tell the boss bad news, so only good information is passed to them. The book contrasts the idea of a supremo leader with the leader of a cult. A cult is a more extreme than a business, but there are enough parallels to make the comparison interesting, in for example the collapse of Enron.

As usual the business schools are also part of the problem.