Book Reviews

The Leadership Factor

By John Kotter

Reviewed by Steve Buchwald, CIRM

Although this book is more about the topic of developing leaders within a company it is still full of good ideas on developing people in general.

John Kotter is Professor of Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management at the Harvard Business School and author of two other books on leadership. In this book Kotter outlines why he believes most American corporations do not have the leadership capacity they need. In addition to this, though, he uses data from 900 senior executives in 100 American corporations, as well as in-depth interviews with 150 top managers in fifteen successful companies, to identify those practices that develop superior leadership.

For the purposes of this book Kotter defines leadership as "the process of moving a group (or groups) in some direction through mostly non-coercive means." He then further defines Effective leadership as "leadership that produces movement in the long-term best interests of the group(s)." In using these definitions Kotter then distinguishes leadership from management and goes to great lengths to define the characteristics necessary for effective leadership, like a thorough understanding of the business and internal contacts to list just two. He also addresses the issue of how to think about the ideas raised in this book.

He says that, "the problem today is that many people consider these issues either esoteric (e.g., leadership is about Gandhi or Churchill) or personnel trivialities (e.g., recruiting), or possibly both." These people fail to see that today the issue of leadership is relevant to the many not just the few.

Kotter underscores all his points with real life stories, both the success and the failures. This book is a short book with only 144 pages including the appendix, which includes the initial survey Kotter sent out. This book is a quick read and I highly recommend it to everyone. Even if you are not in a position to effectuate change in the way your company treats people it may help you to understand that your company is not the only one like this. In addition, if you can get one person of power in your organization to understand the following quote from the book, "A firm that has taken the time to develop practices and programs that build strong management teams able to provide a business with effective leadership has a most powerful source of competitive advantages," you may have indeed started a leadership development movement that may put you way ahead of your competition.

Good reading!