Leadership Bibliography

Web resources

• Leader to Leader Institute
  The Leader to Leader Institute (formerly the Drucker Foundation) is a non-profit, charitable organization whose mission is to "strengthen the leadership of the social sector," by which they mean other non-profit, community organizations. This makes the Institute a unique resource, since most leadership resources, both on the Web and in print, are geared towards business leadership. For that purpose, the Institute organizes conferences and cross-sector projects and provides leadership articles free on its website, in addition to its journal publications and workshops. This is a great site for librarians in the public (rather than business) sector who want to develop leadership in a context which is more in tune with their organizations than the usual business-leadership orientation.
• About.com: Leadership
  The About.com web subject guide to leadership is a fairly comprehensive compendium of links to resources about many aspects of leadership, including popular leadership theories, leadership articles, leadership assessment tools, leadership studies, leadership styles, leadership training and consulting services, student leadership development programs, and world famous leaders. The site's commercial motive unfortunately leads to a profusion of sponsored links, most of which focus in psychology rather than leadership; however, this is one of the few subject guides on the web which focus specifically on web resources rather than print.
• Free Management Library
  The Management Assistance Program for Nonprofits in St. Paul, Minnesota publishes a web "library" of resources for both non-profit and for-profit businesses. The resources cover a wide spectrum of subjects, but there are two explicitly leadership-related pages of resources, one entitled "Leadership Development" and another entitled "Leadership (Introduction)." The introduction to leadership, for example, gives an overview of various aspects of leadership, with links to detailed articles as well as to other related topics. All the articles are within the Free Management Library site. The site especially stresses the complementary nature of leadership and management and that the "lesser activities" of management, such as "planning, organizing, and coordinating," are just as important as visionary leading.
• EmergingLeader.com
  EmergingLeader.com describes itself as "a user driven site which serves both as a sounding board for fresh leadership ideas and a repository for lessons learned and experience gained." The site itself features a mission ("To provide a forum for leadership improvement through user participation and submissions") and a vision ("To continue to grow, improve, and provide our customers with the best information for the betterment of their own leadership skills"). It features articles, links, and comments that are submitted by users of the site. Many of the articles are written by people involved in business leadership training, and they address many different aspects of leadership. There is also a small section on "Lessons Learned," where people can submit short pieces about lessons they have learned about leadership.
• Harvard Business Review magazine
  Harvard Business Review provides articles and information that are often of interest to business executives. As it is a subscription magazine, the full text of articles is not available online for free. Subscribers can read the magazine online, and non-subscribers can view longish abstracts of articles that the magazine hopes they will then order. Although not a substitute for the whole article, the abstracts summarize the main points. The December 2001 issue, in particular, has many articles on the subject of leadership.
• Greenleaf Center for Servant-Leadership
  The Greenleaf Center for Servant-Leadership takes a different tack from most other sites and resources which are primarily oriented towards chief executives who lead from the top and front rather than from below. According to this site, servant leaders are "people who choose to serve first, and then lead;" they may or may not hold formal leadership positions. The goal and test of servant leadership is to help those who are served to grow as persons and to make them more likely to become servants themselves. This is a leadership philosophy that fits in very well with the user-service philosophy of librarianship; our natural desire is to serve the public, and the philosophy of servant-leadership can help us to serve as well as to lead at the same time.
• Institute for Women's Leadership
  The Institute for Women's Leadership provides leadership training, coaching and consulting to both women and men, although their focus is primarily on women's leadership development, "based on our belief that increasing the number and quality of women leaders exponentially improves an organization's ability to innovate, collaborate, and improve performance." Women's leadership ability is extremely important in a profession such as librarianship, which is primarily populated by women but led by men.
• Center for Creative Leadership
  Like many other leadership-oriented sites, the Center for Creative Leadership prominently displays its mission: "To advance the understanding, practice, and development of leadership for the benefit of society worldwide." The Center provides workshop programs and leadership products and also conducts leadership research which it then makes public in books, on their website, at public speaking events, or in work with developmental associations. One of its goals is to affect the way organizations think about management and leadership.

©2003 Laura Melton