The best books for understanding why we get the leaders we do

Machiavelli is often despised as the man who promoted both authoritarian leaders and the notion that the ends justify the means, but this is to misunderstand the importance of the context within which he was writing: 16th century Florence – which was besieged by enemies on every side who proclaimed adherence to the Christian faith but acted as monsters. Machiavelli’s writing made two things clear to me. First, leaders and leadership cannot be understood if you abstract them from their context – when political morality is a contradiction in terms then leaders must be wary of sacrificing their followers for the sake of that same fallacious morality. Second, he lays out how dictators obtain and retain power – and in doing so establishes what we need to do to stop them or remove them. 

I first read this at school, and it fascinated and terrified me at the same time in portraying how power corrupts leaders, how language acts as a device to persuade us that day is night, and how even a morally upright stand against tyranny can descend into an even worse tyranny. The lessons are not just about the decay at the heart of the Bolsheviks in Russia but about how we need to think about leadership, especially political leadership. In democratic systems, we consistently strive to elect and promote the best leaders available, but perhaps this isn’t the most important point. Perhaps the point is to recognize that the main advantage of democracy is not getting the right people at the top but the ability to remove them when things go wrong.

I’m often asked which leaders I most admire, and my response is always hesitant, mainly because like everyone else, leaders are flawed, and because there are lots of people who are leaders that I admire but they are not always in the public eye and often very humble people. I was in the audience when Mandela came to Oxford University in 2002 and the students spontaneously started singing the South African national anthem as he walked in; it was an incredibly moving moment. This book represents both the best kind of leader and also the personal sacrifices that are a necessary – and often underestimated – aspect of a crucial element of leadership: purpose.

I’ve known Donna for years and she’s one of the most thoughtful, caring, and critical scholars in the field. This book captures that approach perfectly – it grapples with complex theory but in a way that allows the non-specialist reader to unpick the complexities and see them illustrated with both mundane and profound examples. Moreover, it steers well away from the snake oil sales approaches that are so common amongst the literally thousands of ‘how to lead’ books that are published every year, often with little theoretical framework or empirical support.

There is a genre in academic leadership writing that automatically correlates leadership with positive outcomes, to the point where anything deleterious is relegated to something other than leadership: the land of tyrants, psychopaths, and the like – the so-called ‘Hitler problem’. But this is to deny three crucial aspects of leadership: one, we cannot simply judge the morality of leaders by our own standards; two, many very successful leaders have indeed been tyrants; and three, all leaders embody a wide range of behaviors and actions that necessarily lead to good and less good outcomes. This book provides a thorough review of the whole area – and marks out what we need to be wary of.