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Thinking About Leadership

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Book Review # 2: Thinking About Leadership
Michael A. Woodhouse
MLS 5300: Essentials of Leadership

ABSTRACT
Thinking About Leadership, written by Nannerl O. Keohane is a holistic view of leadership in efforts to analyze leadership through discussions of both active leadership and leadership philosophy. She also analyzes personality characteristics that are helpful for successful leadership skills and gets even more specific by examining the role of gender in our understanding and our appreciation for different styles of leadership. The purpose of this review is to illustrate the core focus of this book and to provide my own analytical views of it.
Koehane begins her analysis of Thinking About Leadership by discussing in depth the concept of a leader emerging from a group that has no predetermined leaders among it, however they have a collective goal or purpose. Koehane uses the classic novel The Lord of the Flies as an example of this “origin story” concept (Koehane, 2010, p 19). Although particularly basic this example serves as groundwork of the definition of leadership that Koehane is trying to construct. Her definition simply stated is, ‘leaders determine or clarify goals for a group of individuals and bring together the energies of members of that group to accomplish those goals’ (Koehane, 2010, p 22). With this definition of leadership, one can assume many things. The first as Philip Selznick states, leadership is centered on accomplishing the needs of a social situation (Koehane, 2010, p 24). Furthermore leadership is not only specific to us as human beings. She also provides evidence of this type of behavior in a variety of other animal species.
I completely agree with Koehane and her definition of leadership. This definition is by far one of my favorites I have read to date. I cannot think of a time where leadership would not fall in line with

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