Time To Lead by Jan-benedict Steenkamp, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters

Where is leadership when we need it—and what can today’s corporate, non-profit, military, and public-service leaders learn from bold decisions that changed the course of history?In Time to Lead, Jan-Benedict Steenkamp (Distinguished Professor and former Chairman of Marketing at the University of North Carolina) presents a fresh examination of history-making leaders by holding a magnifying glass up to a life-changing dilemma each figure faced. In the process, he reveals just how strongly a leader’s personality and decision-making process can determine a history-changing outcome with wide-ranging implications for millions of people. The ways that great men and women found solutions to the problems they confronted has a lot to do with their character traits—whether they were foxes or hedgehogs, as in the ancient parable, or, as Steenkamp further categorizes, eagles or ostriches. Steenkamp is passionate about leadership, a dedicated student of history, and one of the world’s leading thinkers on strategy. His sixteen well-researched and carefully curated case studies of world leaders reveal powerful lessons that today’s leaders can apply in their own professional lives. Readers will recognize Roosevelt, Washington, Mandela, Thatcher, Alexander the Great, and MLK, but other leaders who may be less known, such as Themistocles, Clovis, Peter, Fisher, Nightingale, and de Gaulle provide equally valuable insights into how individuals make decisions based upon one of seven leadership styles (adaptive, persuasive, directive, disruptive, authentic, servant, and charismatic) and four personality classifications (hedgehog, fox, eagle, or ostrich). For seasoned and aspiring leaders, Steenkamp includes assessment tools to help determine their unique leadership style, along with guidance on how to make a particular style work when they inevitably come face-to-face with their own dilemmas. Takeaways, leadership principles, and open-ended, reflective questions will confer encouragement, enrichment, and empowerment on readers when they realize they can utilize the same tactics as these leaders did in their own lives. Time to Lead is a book is about great men and women, their actions in leadership that have withstood the test of time, what we can learn from them—and the lessons that are relevant for us here and now. | Time To Lead by Jan-benedict Steenkamp, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters