Leadership is based on complex phenomena
Works on the subject of leadership weigh down bookstore shelves the world over. Tomes tell you how to be a 30-second manager, how to inspire your employees like Churchill, and the three keys to "strength-based leadership."
Everyone has been writing about leadership, in fact, except the people you would expect to be most active in the field: scholars.
"If we look at the leading research universities and at the business schools within them, the topic of leadership has been actually given fairly short shrift," says Harvard Business School professor Rakesh Khurana.
Q: What aspects of leadership were you most keen to explore during these discussions? What was the range of viewpoints?
Now, with the premium being placed on innovation as a key differentiator and source of competitive advantage, it is time we all reread her work. In the same vein, we recommend the work of urban planners.82 It is not surprising that the ideas of Horst Rittel, an eminent urban planner and designer, are very much in vogue. Rittel found that traditional planning and problem-solving methods were inadequate for the ill-structured problems he encountered in city planning. Like Follett he often found himself working on what he termed "wicked problems," problems that, among other things, cannot really be understood until they are solved.83 Rittel invented what he described as a "structure for rational discourse":
This article was provided with permission from Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.