A Leader's Legacy - Hardcover

by James M. Kouzes (Author), Barry Z. Posner (Author)

Uncover the latest developments in leadership development and coaching with insights from two of the most respected voices on the subject

In this provocative book, leadership experts and authors of the best-selling The Leadership Challenge, Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner take on a unique challenge and explore questions of leadership and legacy. In 22 stand-alone chapters, Kouzes and Posner examine the critical questions all leaders must ask themselves before they can leave a lasting impact.

These powerful essays are grouped into four categories: Significance, Relationships, Aspirations, and Courage. In each essay the authors consider a thorny and often ambiguous issue with which today's leaders must grapple--such as how leaders serve and sacrifice, why leaders need loving critics, why leaders should want to be liked, why leaders can't take trust for granted, why it's not just the leader's vision that matters, why failure is always an option, why it takes courage to "make a life," how to liberate the leader in everyone, and ultimately, how the legacy you leave is the life you lead.

In the book, you'll find:

• A free-flowing discussion of leadership topics and lessons
• Incisive explorations of ambiguous issues and paradoxes that have bedeviled leaders for generations
• Concise and to-the-point essays representing new approaches to familiar themes, new stories, and new experiences

A Leader's Legacy is an indispensable resource for managers, executives, and other business leaders looking for insightful new ways to push their leadership development further than they ever thought possible.

Front Jacket

"By asking ourselves how we want to be remembered, we plant the seeds for living our lives as if we matter. By living each day as if we matter, we offer up our own unique legacy. By offering up our own unique legacy, we make the world we inhabit a better place than we found it."
--From the Introduction

In this provocative book, leadership experts and authors of the best-selling The Leadership Challenge Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner take on a unique challenge and explore the question of leadership and legacy.

Kouzes and Posner examine in twenty-two chapters the critical questions all leaders must ask themselves in order to leave a lasting impact. These powerful essays are grouped into four categories: Significance, Relationships, Aspirations, and Courage. In each essay the authors consider a thorny and often ambiguous issue with which today's leaders must grapple-- issues such as how leaders serve and sacrifice, why leaders need loving critics, why leaders should want to be liked, why leaders can't take trust for granted, why it's not just the leader's vision, why failure is always an option, why it takes courage to "make a life," how to liberate the leader in everyone, and ultimately, how the legacy you leave is the life you lead.

A Leader's Legacy is Kouzes and Posner's most personal and compelling work to date. They focus on the core challenges leaders face and offer up a thoughtful and reassuring perspective any leader--or aspiring leader--can use to explore the choices they make as they walk their path to greatness.

Back Jacket

What Leaders Are Saying About A Leader's Legacy

"Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner have done it again! In a brilliant follow-up to The Leadership Challenge, they offer the combined wisdom of decades of studying and working with leaders. In 22 thoughtful essays they summarize with depth and clarity what is really important for you as a leader: your courage, your relationships, and the legacy you leave behind."
--Bill George, former chairman and CEO, Medtronic; author, Authentic Leadership

"This superb book defies conventional wisdom in favor of being truly wise. In chapters such as 'Leaders Should Want to Be Liked' and 'Failure Is Always an Option, ' Kouzes and Posner portray leaders on a human scale, opening leadership to anyone who is willing to be fully human. That, of course, is a challenge! And yet the style of this book--with its stories of well-grounded leaders and its engaging conversational prose--encourages the reader to live into and up to that challenge. A Leader's Legacy will surely become key to the literary legacy that its authors have been leaving in their wake over the past twenty-five years."
--Parker J. Palmer, author, The Courage to Teach, A Hidden Wholeness, and Let Your Life Speak

"In their new book, Kouzes and Posner provide a badly needed supplement to all those other books on leadership. First, they don't just say that everyone can be a leader--that oft-repeated bromide is little more than a cliché now. They demonstrate (with good examples) how true and important the idea is. And second (again with effective examples) they make 'leadership' something that will interest not just 'organizational' types but anyone who hopes to make a difference in the world."
--William Bridges, author, Transitions and Managing Transition

"A Leader's Legacy is an indispensable daily reference for leaders at every level of every enterprise. Legacy is a gift to leaders of today, to leaders of the future."
--Frances Hesselbein, chairman, Leader to Leader Institute

Author Biography

JIM KOUZES is an Executive Fellow at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University.

BARRY POSNER is dean of the Leavey School of Business and professor of leadership at Santa Clara University.

Together, they are the authors of the award-winning and bestselling book The Leadership Challenge, as well as the widely used Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI).