OK, we know you're not likely to pay $600 for a set of books, but it's good to be aware of this encyclopedia anyway. The groaningly huge volumesthe A-E section alone is 474 pagesanalyze every imaginable aspect of the umbrella topic we call leadership in a style that is accessible, well organized, and very impressive in its scope.
Want to know about leadership theories? There are entries on almost forty of them. How about leadership styles? Seventeen of those. The volumes contain entries on the arts, individuals (Akbar through Brigham Young), business (twenty-eight profiles of companies or people), science, social movements, politics, et cetera. The benefit and perhaps disadvantage of this set is that there is just so much material. If you were to make a list of topics that should be included in a leadership encyclopedia you might have found it hard to draw the line, too. Nonetheless, it is a bit jarring to see that Bay of Pigs is followed immediately by Beatles, The; and then by Beethoven, Ludwig Van. But the quirky juxtapositions certainly captured my interest for leisurely browsing more than would a book weighed down with dry theory. The descriptions are clear, never impenetrable.
Part of the appeal is that the set looks at leadership with a little "l," folding in every possible instance of life in which some person or idea has taken ascendance. In alphabetical style these range from "Achievement Motivation" (described as "the desire to achieve a personal or public standard of excellence, to do well for the sake of doing well rather than for extrinsic reward or for some other goal") to Youth Leadership. In the encyclopedia's all-encompassing power, however, it is almost hard to tell why this is about leadership at all and not an encyclopedia highlighting a mixed bag of important and interesting people, ideas, and behavior.
The editors head off the complaint with a fair defense of why their interpretation of leadership is so broad. As a discipline, "leadership" has been bandied about quite a bit in the past decade or so, but it actually draws on eternal questions of human character in confrontation with reality, as editor James MacGregor Burns writes in the foreword. The book was guided by a set of questions that can only be tackled in a very open-minded sense. What is leadership? What is a great leader? What is a great follower? How does someone become a leader? What are the types of leadership? How can leadership theories help us understand contemporary situations? How can I learn to be a good, and perhaps even a great, leader?
For us readers, if such questions may be addressed with entries as diverse as D-Day, the Manhattan Project, Nelson Mandela, and Genghis Khan, well why not?
The volumes are nicely peppered with 150 photos and illustrations as well as noteworthy quotes, including this classic by Theodore Roosevelt: "People ask the difference between a leader and a boss. The leader works in the open, and the boss in covert. The leader leads, and the boss drives."
Pulling together this mammoth set appears to have been a Herculean undertaking. Two project directors were joined by eight editors and a posse of a couple hundred contributors, most of whom are academic experts in their fields. The editorial board includes professors from Harvard, Oxford, Claremont Graduate University, and other institutions. The editors state at the outset that creating an encyclopedia on any topic is "a true sign of the coming of age of a new and significant field of study." Given all the books out there in both the popular and academic press professing to describe leadership, this observation rings true. The time is right for the Encyclopedia of Leadership.
Martha Lagace