Critical Review - On Becoming a Leader by Warren Bennis
Everywhere you trip is where the treasure lies.
While looking for a book for my class assignment I bumped into tremendous amount of them talking about leadership. Why there are so many? Why has leadership received so much attention? Which one I have to pick? Why we study leadership at all? Isn't it what coming with years of experience? Many people believe that a leader is an aggressive person who "inspires" others to work hard to accomplish important tasks. Then why those publications take a colossal part in the market of popular books? Is leadership a learned behavior? "On Becoming a Leader" by Warren Bennis is the book I picked, intrigued by the front cover announcement "The Leadership Classic". Warren Bennis's approach in this book can be described as a "leadership by looking around". He discusses the essence of leadership and how individuals become leaders by examining numbers of successful leaders. Presence of these examples is very helpful, because we can integrate those leadership qualities into our own lives. In the very beginning of his book Bennis said "leadership is like beauty: it's hard to define, but you know it when you see it" . This statement is reflective throughout the book in those examples.
In the introductions - one written for the original publication and one a few years later - Bennis states his premises about leadership. He believes that everyone has the capacity for leadership . Why he wants us, his readers, to be so confident? He acknowledges that there are no rules and predictable patterns in leadership, but still encourages us to take risk, make mistakes, and express ourselves to become a successful leader. He firmly believes leaders are made, not born . Learning and developing abilities are more important that the ability one was born with. Those who took risk, made mistakes, and reflected to own failure - understood, thus, learned from the experience, and become leaders. "On Becoming a Leader" is based on the assumption that leaders
While looking for a book for my class assignment I bumped into tremendous amount of them talking about leadership. Why there are so many? Why has leadership received so much attention? Which one I have to pick? Why we study leadership at all? Isn't it what coming with years of experience? Many people believe that a leader is an aggressive person who "inspires" others to work hard to accomplish important tasks. Then why those publications take a colossal part in the market of popular books? Is leadership a learned behavior? "On Becoming a Leader" by Warren Bennis is the book I picked, intrigued by the front cover announcement "The Leadership Classic". Warren Bennis's approach in this book can be described as a "leadership by looking around". He discusses the essence of leadership and how individuals become leaders by examining numbers of successful leaders. Presence of these examples is very helpful, because we can integrate those leadership qualities into our own lives. In the very beginning of his book Bennis said "leadership is like beauty: it's hard to define, but you know it when you see it" . This statement is reflective throughout the book in those examples.
In the introductions - one written for the original publication and one a few years later - Bennis states his premises about leadership. He believes that everyone has the capacity for leadership . Why he wants us, his readers, to be so confident? He acknowledges that there are no rules and predictable patterns in leadership, but still encourages us to take risk, make mistakes, and express ourselves to become a successful leader. He firmly believes leaders are made, not born . Learning and developing abilities are more important that the ability one was born with. Those who took risk, made mistakes, and reflected to own failure - understood, thus, learned from the experience, and become leaders. "On Becoming a Leader" is based on the assumption that leaders