On the list of discussion topics with staying power, leadership has few rivals. Love, sex and death come to mind, but the first one scares us, the second one embarrasses us, and who really wants to think about the latter, much less talk about it?
Leadership, on the other hand, is fun to debate. It’s like sports and politics (perhaps that why we look to those two arenas so much for leaders) in that people can have different opinions and none of them is necessarily right or wrong.
You could fill countless libraries with the books that have been written on leadership. Business books have regaled a wide swath of leadership strategies, from great war generals like Sun Tzu to fictional TV characters like Tony Soprano. (As it turns out, the former may be as fictional as the latter.)
Also like sports and politics, leadership prompts impassioned and opposing views. One of the best recent articles regarding leadership is a July 2012 Wired cover feature entitled “Do You Really Want To Be Like Steve Jobs?” It’s an intelligent and balanced look at the upside and downside of the late Apple CEO’s volatile personality and his demanding — and often demeaning — approach to leading others. (An indicator of how we love to talk about leadership: the online discussion among readers on that article alone is nearing 200 posts.)
What does leadership look like? What do leaders do? It’s impossible to answer those questions in a single magazine story or even a year’s worth of stories. If we get you thinking about the questions and debating the topic in your circle of business associates, that’s as important as providing whatever answers we could come up with.
One thing we know is that leaders engage those who work with them, which is why we selected as the centerpiece of this package an article by Wilson Learning Worldwide COO Thomas Roth on how leaders create a culture of engagement.
It’s important to note, also, that while this particular issue is called our “Leadership Issue,” and this cover feature spans only a portion of the magazine, leadership as a topic — what it looks like, how to improve at it, and what new tools exist to assist you in leading — is at the heart of our entire content, both in print and online as SalesAndMarketing.com. We love the subject. We enjoy the fact that it’s always evolving. And we welcome your input.
