Leadership BS

Jeffrey Pfeffer – since 1979 the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and author or co-author of 14 books – is among the world’s foremost management experts. With credentials like those, you might not expect Pfeffer to be an hilarious, cynical, hard-nosed debunker of management-expert truisms – but he is.

From his first paragraph, Pfeffer stakes out his ground in no uncertain terms: Legends and heroic stories, he says, cannot generate real change. He finds that current, widely held notions about leadership derive mostly from wishing they were so – not from empirical data. Pfeffer impatiently rejects the current vogue that claims the best leaders are the most compassionate. Amusingly, he argues that narcissistic leaders pose less of an obstacle to success than does the fantasy that collaboration and charitable behavior fuel success.