LEADERSHIP ON THE LINE: Staying Alive the Dangers of Leading

LEADERSHIP ON THE LINE: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading.

By Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky. Harvard Business School Press. 252 pp. $27.50

"A man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must necessarily come to grief among so many who are not good." So said Niccolò Machiavelli in his incomparable guide to leadership, The Prince (1513). He felt compelled to add that in order to survive, a prince must "learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge and not use it, according to the necessity of the case."

Machiavelli is long dead, but the challenges of leadership live on, even in a time and place that idealizes a very different model of authority. Thus we have Leadership on the Line, an earnest guide to leadership in the therapeutic age. Heifetz and Linsky are thoughtful and widely experienced authors who teach at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, but they come across at times as Alan Alda with an MBA.

There is a certain aptness in this. Their audience is not, after all, securing a hostile Italian city-state but trying to get something done in the land of computers and cubicles. And as business books go, this one is a model of clarity. Much of what the authors say is obviously right, and their combined experience and reading give real depth to their advice, even if it is occasionally couched in some awful dialect of consultantspeak, as in "Hennie Both and Ruud Koedijk maintained high energy within the holding environment of the task force structure."

What’s more, they’ve tackled the right subject. It’s clear from the torrent of management books published every year, to say nothing of the fortune spent on "organizational development" and other such consulting, that people in business have a deep hunger for help in this arena. Heifetz and Linsky obligingly flesh out their work with a great many anecdotes about famous leaders, including corporate chieftains, presidents, and other luminaries.

But in doing so, the authors beg a big question: Why are people in business reading books like this one when they could simply read Machiavelli? Every corporate chieftain lives by at least some of his rules. It was Machiavelli who said that "in taking a state, the conqueror must arrange to commit all his cruelties at once," after which he can dole out soothing kindnesses. And who can dispute that "there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things?"

The Prince is the ultimate self-help book for big shots, but literature, too, is full of books that deal in dramatic fashion with problems of leadership. Consider Joseph Conrad’s Typhoon (1903), Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier (1912), or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon (1941). Better yet, pick one of Shakespeare’s tragedies at random. Or how about what the leaders themselves have to say? Surely Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs (1885) can teach us more, and more effectively, than yet another book by a management guru. Alfred P. Sloan’s My Years with General Motors (1964) is a classic that remains in print, and even Jack Welch’s Jack: Straight from the Gut (2001) has many interesting things to say about leadership.

The fundamental question, of course, is whether this sort of thing can be learned at all. Machiavelli knew about that problem too. "It is an infallible rule," he wrote, "that a prince who is not wise himself cannot be well-advised."

—Daniel Akst