A LEADER'S LEGACY(领导艺术)

"By asking ourselves how we want to be remembered, we plant the seeds for living our lives as if we matter. By living each day as if we matter, we offer up our own unique legacy. By offering up our own unique legacy, we make the world we inhabit a better place than we found it."
　　—From the Introduction
　　In this provocative book, leadership experts and authors of the best-selling The Leadership Challenge Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner take on a unique challenge and explore the question of leadership and legacy.
　　Kouzes and Posner examine in twenty-two chapters the critical questions all leaders must ask themselves in order to leave a lasting impact. These powerful essays are grouped into four categories: Significance, Relationships, Aspirations, and Courage. In each essay the authors consider a thorny and often ambiguous issue with which today's leaders must grapple— issues such as how leaders serve and sacrifice, why leaders need loving critics, why leaders should want to be liked, why leaders can't take trust for granted, why it's not just the leader's vision, why failure is always an option, why it takes courage to "make a life," how to liberate the leader in everyone, and ultimately, how the legacy you leave is the life you lead.
　　A Leader's Legacy is Kouzes and Posner's most personal and compelling work to date. They focus on the core challenges leaders face and offer up a thoughtful and reassuring perspective any leader—or aspiring leader—can use to explore the choices they make as they walk their path to greatness.

Review " …an often emotional but compelling book…offers a thoughtful and reassuring perspective that any leader or aspiring leader can use…" (Business Executive, June 2007) Review "Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner have done it again! In clear, concise essays filled with wisdom and insight, they set the standard of what leaders need to be in order to excel in the twenty-first century, starting with the legacy that they want to leave behind. A Leader's Legacy is a must-read, not just for those at the top of organizations but for anyone at any level who aspires to be a leader." —Bill George, former chairman and CEO, Medtronic; author, Authentic Leadership

"This superb book defies conventional wisdom in favor of being truly wise. In chapters such as ‘Leaders Should Want to Be Liked’ and ‘Failure Is Always an Option,’ Kouzes and Posner portray leaders on a human scale, opening leadership to anyone who is willing to be fully human. That, of course, is a challenge! And yet the style of this book—with its stories of well-grounded leaders and its engaging conversational prose—encourages the reader to live into and up to that challenge. A Leader's Legacy will surely become key to the literary legacy that its authors have been leaving in their wake over the past twenty-five years." —Parker J. Palmer, author, The Courage to Teach, A Hidden Wholeness, and Let Your Life Speak

"In their new book, Kouzes and Posner provide a badly needed supplement to all those other books on leadership. First, they don’t just say that everyone can be a leader—that oft-repeated bromide is little more than a cliché now. They demonstrate (with good examples) how true and important the idea is. And second (again with effective examples) they make ‘leadership’ something that will interest not just ‘organizational’ types but anyone who hopes to make a difference in the world." —William Bridges, author, Transitions and Managing Transition

"A Leader’s Legacy is an indispensable daily reference for leaders at every level of every enterprise. Legacy is a gift to leaders of today, to leaders of the future." —Frances Hesselbein, chairman, Leader to Leader Institute

Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner are coauthors of the award-winning and best-selling book, The Leadership Challenge, with over 1.4 million copies sold in more than seventeen different languages. They have coauthored more than a dozen books, including Credibility: How Leaders Gain It and Lose It, Why People Demand It—chosen by Industry Week as one of its year’s five best management books—and Encouraging the Heart. Jim and Barry also developed the highly acclaimed Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI), a 360-degree questionnaire assessing leadership behavior, which is one of the most widely used leadership assessment instruments in the world. More than three hundred doctoral dissertations and academic research projects have been based on the “Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership” model.

Introduction
Part One: Significance
　1 Leaders Serve and Sacrifice
　2 The Best Leaders Are Teachers
　3 We All Need Loving Critics
　4 You Are the Most Important Leader in Your Organization
　5 No One Likes to Be an Assumption
　Part Two: Relationships
　6 Leadership Is Personal
　7 Leaders Should Want to Be Liked
　8 When You Don’t See Eye to Eye, Seek toUnderstand
　9 You Can’t Take Trust for Granted
　10 Let Your People Go
Part Three: Aspirations
　11 Lead from the Inside Out
　12 Forward-Looking Is a Leadership Prerequisite
　13 It’s Not Just the Leader’s Vision
　14 Liberate the Leader in Everyone
　15 Leaders Are Followers, Too!
　Part Four: Courage
　16 There’s Courage in All of Us
　17 You Can’t Plan to Be Courageous, But You Can Choose It
　18 It Takes Courage to Make a Life
　19 The Courage to Be Human
　20 Failure Is Always an Option
　21 No Money-Back Guarantee
Afterword: The Legacy You Leave Is the Life You Lead
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Index