Barbara Kellerman

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About Barbara Kellerman
Barbara Kellerman is the James MacGregor Burns Lecturer in Public Leadership at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. She was the Founding Executive Director of the Kennedy School's Center for Public Leadership, from 2000 to 2003; and from 2003 to 2006 she served as the Center's Research Director. Kellerman has held professorships at Fordham, Tufts, Fairleigh Dickinson, George Washington, and Uppsala Universities. She also served as Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at Fairleigh Dickinson, and as Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Leadership at the Academy of Leadership at the University of Maryland.
Kellerman received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. (1975, in Political Science) degrees from Yale University. She was awarded a Danforth Fellowship and three Fulbright fellowships. At Uppsala (1996-97), she held the Fulbright Chair in American Studies. Kellerman was cofounder of the International Leadership Association (ILA), and is author and editor of many books including Leadership: Multidisciplinary Perspectives; The Political Presidency: Practice of Leadership; and Reinventing Leadership: Making the Connection Between Politics and Business. She has appeared often on media outlets such as CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, NPR, Reuters and BBC, and has contributed articles and reviews to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and the Harvard Business Review.
Her most recent books are Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters (2004); a co-edited (with Deborah Rhode) volume, Women & Leadership: State of Play and Strategies for Change (2007); and Followership: How Followers are Creating Change and Changing Leaders (2008). Kellerman speaks to audiences around the world, including in recent years Berlin, London, Moscow, Rome, Sao Paolo, Shanghai, Zurich, Jerusalem, Turin, Toronto, and Montreal. She is on the Advisory Board of the Leadership Research Network, on the Advisory Panel of the White House Leadership Project Report, on the editorial Board of Leadership Quarterly, and on the Publications Committee of the International Leadership Association. She is ranked by Forbes.com as among "Top 50 Business Thinkers" (2009) and by Leadership Excellence in top 15 of 100 "best minds on leadership." Her next book, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence, will be published in March 2010 by McGraw-Hill.
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Books By Barbara Kellerman
The problem is leadership has stayed stuck. It has remained an occupation instead of becoming a profession. Unlike medicine and law, leadership has no core curriculum considered essential. It has no widely agreed on metric, or criteria for qualification. And it has no professional association to oversee the conduct of its members or assure minimum standards. Professionalizing Leadership looks to a past in which learning to lead was the most important of eruditions. It looks to a present in which learning to lead is as effortless as ubiquitous. And it looks to a future in which learning to be a leader might look different altogether - it might resemble the far more rigorous process of learning to be a doctor or a lawyer. As it stands now, the military is the only major American institution that gets it right. It assumes leadership is a profession that requires those who practice it to be taught in accordance with high professional standards. Barbara Kellerman draws on the military experience specifically to develop a template for learning how to lead generally.
Leadership in the first quarter of the present century is different from what it was even in the last quarter of the past century - which is why leadership taught casually and carelessly should no longer suffice. Professionalizing Leadership addresses precisely the problem of how to prepare leaders in accordance with professional norms. It provides the template necessary for transforming leadership from dubious occupation to respectable profession.
Bolster your leadership literacy—and improve your performance as a leader or manager.
Leadership, says author, leadership expert, and Harvard Professor Barbara Kellerman, "is all about what leaders should learn—but it is decidedly not, deliberately not, about what leadership education has lately come to look like."
Instead, Leadership is a concise yet expansive collection of great leadership literature that has stood the test of time. As Kellerman makes clear in her extensive, authoritative commentaries, every single selection has had, and continues to have, an impact on how and what we think about what it means to lead. And every single one has had an impact on leadership as an area of intellectual inquiry—as well as on the course of human history.
Part I of Leadership consists of writings about leadership:
- Lao Tzu—on how to lead lightly
- Plato—on tyrants and philosopher-kings
- Machiavelli—on the preservation of power
In Part II, you'll find examples of what Kellerman uniquely identifies as writing as leadership—works and words that thanks to their persuasiveness and power, changed the world:
- Thomas Paine—Common Sense
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton—"Declaration of Sentiments"
- Rachel Carson—Silent Spring
Part III presents leaders in action—individuals who seized the moment to captivate, motivate, and lead with their singular personal power to persuade:
- Abraham Lincoln—on war and redemption
- Elizabeth I—on gender and power
- Vaclav Havel—on the power of the powerless
The selections themselves, each a classic of the leadership literature, together with Kellerman's expert commentary, make Leadership required reading for those who want to learn about, reflect on, and even apply the greatest leadership literature lessons, ever.
Barbara Kellerman is the James MacGregor Burns Lecturer in Public Leadership at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, and Harvard Business Review, and she has appeared on CBS, NBC, NPR, and CNN. She is author and editor of many books on leadership, most recently Bad Leadership and Followership. Kellerman is ranked by Forbes.com as among the "Top 50 Business Thinkers" (2009), and by Leadership Excellence in the top 15 of 100 "best minds on leadership" (2008-2009).
In Women and Leadership, the eminent legal scholar Deborah L. Rhode focuses on women's underrepresentation in leadership roles and asks why it persists and what we can do about it. Although organizations generally stand to gain from increasing gender equity in leadership, women's underrepresentation is persistent and pervasive. Rhode explores the reasons, including women's family roles, unconscious gender bias, and exclusion from professional development networks. She stresses that we cannot address the problem at the individual level; instead, she argues that we need broad-based strategies that address the deep-seated structural and cultural conditions facing women. She surveys a range of professions in politics, management, law, and academia and draws from a survey of prominent women to develop solutions that can successfully chip away at the imbalance. These include developing robust women-to-women networks, enacting laws and policies that address work/life imbalances, and training programs that start at an earlier age. Rhode's clear exploration of the leadership gap and her compelling policy prescriptions will make this an essential book for anyone interested in leveling the playing field for women leaders in America.