Jeffery Pfeffer: Leadership BS book report Jeffery Pfeffer took a unique approach of addressing what is wrong with leadership training and consulting industry today. He clearly summarizes all the issues with leadership training right from the title of the book. Even the chapters are strategically laid out for the readers to understand one problem at a time. Through his book, Pfeffer outlines that “telling people inspiring stories about heroic leaders and exceptional organizations and, in the process, making those who hear the stories feel good and temporarily uplifted” will not change the problem that the leadership industry faces. The textbook talks about many business schools such as Vlerick business school whose tagline is “Looking for …show more content…
According to him, the idea of Authenticity is misunderstood by majority of individuals because people think that when faced with a crucial situation, a leader must be authentic and true to themselves, but Pfeffer argues the complete opposite. According to him in crucial situations, the least thing that a leader needs to do is be authentic and he also states that leaders do not need to be true to themselves as long as they can “put on a show”. Attitudes and behaviours are so radically affected by the situation in which the leader find themselves that it is almost impossible to be truly authentic; instead a leader needs to be authentic and be true to the situation around them and what the people around them want. According to Pfeffer, the idea that someone can be trained to be authentic is a “delicious Irony” because authenticity cannot be taught. So then if it is “psychologically impossible due to situational effects” to be Authentic, then how can one tell the truth without feeling that they are not being Authentic? To explain this, Pfeffer uses the quote from Bible “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour” (one of the ten commandments) to explain that telling the truth is actually the foundation of a religion. One of the reasons that leaders lie is because they rarely face serious consequences of lying. People lie all the time not only in a professional setting but …show more content…
That was evident in the movies we saw in class both Margin Call and the Enron case. In Margin call, we saw that the CEO John Tuld was not an authentic leader because in class we said that Authenticity was about having ethics and morals but Tuld lacked both of them. We saw the same in the Enron case where both Jeff Skilling and Kenath Lay were unethical and lacked morals. Even though both the leaders were not Authentic, they still were selected for the leadership positions and that is what Pfeffer argue that it is not based if an individual is authentic or not but is rather based on the situation and if an individual is authentic to a situation and can “put on a show”, they will be selected for the leadership