Ebook: Bad leaders : cures and preventions

One of the big mysteries of the current era is “Why are there so many bad leaders in the news and why weren’t they identified and excluded during the recruitment screening process?” My guess is that the capabilities and sensitivities corporations have developed to spot bad business unit managers aren’t always used to weed out bad candidates for top leadership. Unit managers operate in a world of 360 degree feedback. Increasingly, their job is to steer a participatory democracy where creative talent and technologists speak truth to power, where customers rule, and where almost every facet of their business is instantly on view by their bosses and subordinates. Given all this attention, unit managers who behave self indulgently, arrogantly or mendaciously couldn’t keep their office. But what happens when boards get desperate and go looking for savior leaders? Or when boards get greedy and pick a despot to restructure the company and pump the stock? In such cases, I suspect they purposefully don’t cull out all the narcissists and tyrants or the self serving, self dramatizing candidates. Another source of bad leaders are the imperialist founders who rule their submissive boards and everyone else. Whatever route bad leaders take to power, we have to cope with them. So this e-book offers feature articles that look at bad leadership and suggest remedies and preventions. They offer lessons that will be helpful to current and potential leaders, their followers and boards.