What Do Great Leaders Do Differently?
II What’s the difference between leaders that are great and other leaders? That question has fascinated me as long as I’ve been in the working world. I’ve read all the leadership books I could find for my entire working career. They weren’t all that helpful. They either told me how one leader had done it, or they talked about leadership traits. Traits or characteristics are fine and dandy for discussion purposes. It’s fun to argue about whether compassion is more important than mission focus and things like that. The problem is that those discussions don’t tell you anything about what you should actually do. They don’t, and can’t, function as a guide to action. The only books that I could find that were helpful were written by John Kotter, a professor at Harvard. I asked myself, “Why are these books different?” The answer turned out to be strikingly simple. While other folks were testing theories in the best “scientific” tradition, Kotter was watching doing research in the wild. He was
