Authentic Leadership Revisited

Nine years ago today the New York Times favorably reviewed Authentic Leadership, my first book. At the time “authenticity” in leadership was not a well-established idea. Many people asked, “What is an authentic leader?” although the concept seemed self-evident to me as being genuine, real and true to who you are. In those years authenticity has been popularized by Oprah Winfrey and others, as people search for the real thing.

With repeated leadership failures, many people today are eager to find authentic leaders, and the ideas have gradually become widely accepted, even among academics. More and more students are studying authentic leadership and striving to lead in this way. In spite of several well-publicized leadership failures, the new generation of corporate CEOs, many of whom I know personally, are highly authentic and doing an excellent job of leading, in spite of the economic headwinds. I find these trends very encouraging and feel that they bode well for the future of corporate leadership.

For those of you interested in Authentic Leadership and its successor, True North, here are two excellent blogs summarizing its ideas: http://bit.ly/P71wLS and http://bit.ly/NJ7z8x. If you haven’t read either or both, of course www.amazon.com would be happy to send them to you.

As always, your feedback on these ideas is greatly appreciated.