Some movers and shakers seem to be natural leaders, but that's exactly what they want you to think. The truth is, leaders are made, not born. Leadership For Dummies is for anyone with the desire to take the lead. Knowing how to lead is a vital skill that we should all develop as early as possible.

This book shows you how to add leadership skills to your arsenal of personal traits and explains how doing so helps you to achieve more happiness and contentment in all areas of your life. Find out how to see opportunity amid change and crisis, assemble and maintain a top-notch team, and lead with communication, encouragement, and promotion.

Leadership For Dummies helps you gain

• Greater respect
• Greater success
• Greater recognition for the job that you do
• Greater cooperation from friends and family
• Greater and more effective direction in your life and the ability to make a positive difference in your world

If you're not the lead dog, the view never changes. Get the view from the front of the pack with Leadership For Dummies.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Good overview on the subject, but could be better
Comment: Ok, so turning to the for dummies books on a new subject is not a bad approach, and this book does provide a good overview. However, the author make many leaps of logic and did not do a very good job researching is antedotes.

One example is when the author talks about Pres. Truman being a product of the Pendergast political machine in St. Louis. Well, it was actually Kansas City. Not the point of the story, but it does show that the author was careless with his facts.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A Left-leaning, Politically Correct Approach to Leadership
Comment: This is an excellent how-to guide for left-leaning "touchy-feely" types who think, as the authors do, that "one of the reasons that violence in schools has increased among teenagers is that they spend too much time in church hearing that their behavior is considered evil and aberrant" (p. 325) and who write things like dress codes "are a vestige of the old-fashioned command economy and should be allowed to die the death they deserve" (p. 313).

Equating attending church with high school killings is actually offensive, in addition to being flat wrong. And in the real world group identity is helped along precisely by things like dress codes - unless you are a zoned-out hippie. But then again, hippies all dressed alike. Interesting to see the degree of conformity among our diversity-mongers!

Some of the authors' ideas are downright weird: "One of the greatest stumbling blocks to creating a diverse workplace is toleration....Toleration at the very least is condescension." (p. 313) That a major basis for modern Western political evolution of democracy would so glibly be consigned to the garbage can is a sign the authors are not very deep or serious thinkers. Accepting the right of others to do as they see fit does not imply one must agree with what they do or morally condone it - that's the essence of diversity. The authors seem to imply but like most people on the political left never come out and say, that we should accept as equally legitimate just about everything. It's that veiled nihilism parading as enlightenment that makes the text so useless. It is not connected to the real world!!

The nucleus of the text is really quite simple, but there is considerable embellishment and fluff; a good editing could have pared this 350-plus page work down to a more merciful 100-125 pages.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Leaders Are Not Born But Made--It Begins Here!!
Comment: It's an easy read and can be applied immediately to you situation. The book brings the basics of leadership traits and principles to the reader similar to the military leadership books I've read in the USMC. So many times have I held jobs where a manager, although excellent in managing projects, through some lack of sensitity or judgement created an uproar that cause moral to fall and people to become resentful and leave. There are many stories in the press of managers and CEOs restricting "bathroom breaks", playing favorites, freezing wages and laying off employees while taking huge "bonuses" like American Airlines and ENRON. What's present here is basic but essential information for anyone in a leadership roll whether at work, church functions, or managing a family trip. This should be required reading for everyone BEFORE you find yourself in a situation as leader. The boss could be out for a whole month tommorrow. Can you keep the team working smoothly while the boss is out or is it party time?

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Leadship for the Dumb
Comment: This is a remarkably barren book, perhaps the worst I have ever read. The author considers the epitome of leadership to be a left wing american-football-quarterback save-the-whale ban-the-bomb activist. If you are not athletic nor overly sentimental with the obsessions of nanny-state socialism you will find this book patronozing and offensive.

It is also without content - the discourse within being bluff, baffle, waffle, twaddle and blag. There is no inspiration or insight to be gleaned, not even to the degree of a crude platitude.

A better book for leadership is Henry V with its lessons in luminous articulation and its ideal of the noble spirit. It doesnt pretend to have the breadth of Leadership for Dummies, but then what use is an ocean of salt water when you are begging for a cup of tea. ;oD

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Leadership for Dummies
Comment: Having just completed a "Leadership" MBA program at at local University, I was pleased to find this "Dummies" book.

The book introduces many different aspects leadership, in a interesting manner, similar to all of the other "Dummies" series.

The book tells us what it takes to be a leader, the leadership process, the art of leadership, vision and team building.

at 358 pages the book provides an good understanding of what it takes to be a leader, and how we can develop our own skills to develop into effective leaders.

The book was exteremely effective in reinforcing the same leadership principles discussed in my MBA program...but for those of you who don't want to spend the $5K on an MBA leadershiop course..thsi book will get you there!

Strong recommendation...does that mean I am a Dummy?

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