Focus on Leadership: Servant-Leadership for the 21st Century
Robert K. Greenleaf first wrote about a new type of leader, the servant-leader, in 1970, but his idea remains a revolutionary approach to managing an organization. Servant-leadership stresses the importance and benefit leaders gain by serving the welfare of employees, customers, and communities. Traditional leadership modes that concentrate solely on the quest for profit or the attainment of goals at any cost are giving way to a holistic approach to work that promotes a sense of community and the sharing of power in decision-making. Servant-leadership is a long-term, transformational approach to life and work that has the potential for creating positive change throughout society.Focus on Leadership highlights the importance of Greenleaf's ideas on management theory and their impact across the contemporary business landscape. It offers a selection of writing from some of the leading thinkers on servant-leadership and management culture, including Warren Bennis, Stephen Covey, Margaret Wheatley, and John Bogle. It also includes an excerpt from Greenleaf's seminal essay "The Servant as Leader" that serves as an excellent introduction to the principles and essentials of servant-leadership. Other highlights include essays on the ideal servant-leader, companies that have put the servant-leadership model to work in their own corporate structures, servant-leadership at work in educational and philanthropic institutions, and servant-leadership in the new economy.The essays here fall into four categories that cover servant-leadership's relation to the individual, the workplace, the surrounding community, and the world as a whole. These essays present a fundamental understanding and the newest thinking on servant-leadership's ability to change lives in our communities and in communities around the world.For those already familiar with servant-leadership, Focus on Leadership offers an opportunity to further explore Greenleaf's revolutionary ideas. For those just discovering servant-leadership, it serves as both a source of inspiration and a call for enlightenment and change.