Leadership As If People Mattered
I’ve just finished re-reading Leadership Is An Art by Max Depree. He’s a very readable writer, and his books on leadership are more about values than about specific actions.
But that’s okay … leaders need to operate from values, not just mechanically follow cookbook-style instructions on technique. Technique needs to be grounded in values, and attending to the values will help find the right techniques and figure out how to use them well in specific situations.
Depree, who served as CEO of the furniture company Herman Miller, believes in treating the people within the organization — whether a profit or not-for-profit — as full human beings. It sounds simple, but many organizations treat “human resources” as if they’re the moral equivalent of file cabinets: move them around, move them in, move them out, as the organization needs. Depree’s special contribution is to show how treating people as people and not file cabinets is not only the right thing to do morally — it is the right thing to do for organizational success.
It’s worth reading Leadership Is An Art at least every year or so. There are so many great insights into the behavior of human beings within organizations, that you’ll find something new and inspiring each time.
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