
Leadership BS
by Jeffrey Pfeffer · first published 2015
8mentions
1recommended by
2HN commenters
2018–2026first – last mentioned
50% recommend50% neutral
"'The leadership industry has failed,' charges Stanford Business School professor Pfeffer in this lively critique of a professional discipline driven, according to him, not by wisdom or a desire to foster leadership, but by money. Its precepts, he writes, are 'based more on hope than reality, on wishes rather than data, on beliefs instead of science.' Pfeffer sets out to help his readers rethink leadership by focusing on the root causes of failures in business leadership. Pfeffer counsels readers to look away from the 'inspiration and fables' that glut the market, and to accept that some of th
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+1; Very good suggestion. I came to Jeffrey Pfeffer through his other book Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time which is a must read too.
on “Ask HN: Best books for dealing with workplace politics and dishonesty?” ↗You might find Jeffrey Pfeffer's Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time interesting - https://jeffreypfeffer.com/books/leadership-bs-fixing-workpl... Also checkout his other books.
on “Shift from a Leader-Follower to a Leader-Leader Approach” ↗…Speech by Dave Packard to HP Managers - https://gizmodo.com/the-hp-way-how-bill-hewlett-and-i-built-... * Management: A Political Activity by Ted Stephenson. * Managing with Power by Jeffrey Pfeffer. * Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time by Jeffrey Pfeffer. * Power: Why Some People Have It―and Others Don't by Jeffrey Pfeffer.
on “Bad engineering managers think leadership is about power” ↗…https://gizmodo.com/the-hp-way-how-bill-hewlett-and-i-built-... Read and memorize the above. There is a whole lot of BS in the Leadership Industry and we should first educate ourselves on the realities. Start with Jeffrey Pfeffer's "Leadership BS". The above same charge of BS can also be laid at the door of of various Management "theories". A good antidote is Ted Stephenson's "Management: A political activity". Leadership/Management is more…
on “Ask HN: Best book / resources on leadership, especially for tech teams?” ↗…at hand. This is what is the problem with modern-day Management/Leadership and eloquently pointed out by David Graeber(Bullshit Jobs - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs) and Jeffrey Pfeffer(Leadership BS - https://jeffreypfeffer.com/books/leadership-bs-fixing-workpl...). I highly recommend reading this speech by David Packard (one of the founders of Silicon Valley via HP) to new Managers given in 1960…
on “The Worst Programmer” ↗The best way to study this is starting with Jeffrey Pfeffer's Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time.
on “Hell is other people: performance management at Big Tech” ↗…and norms or she won't be surviving in Corporate America. Stanford Business School professor Jeffrey Pfeffer wrote a book about this[1] in particular. [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24331490-leadership-bs
on “Google staff rally behind fired AI researcher” ↗This reminds me of Leadership BS by Jeffrey Pfeffer. [1] And he gave a talk at Google about his book [2] [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-BS-Fixing-Workplaces-Caree... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFXcqSUi3EI
on “Firing Frankness” ↗