Mirrors for Princes: How "Tips for Tyrants" Became Clichés of Leadership - Couverture souple

Keeley, Michael

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1647125537 ISBN 13 : 9781647125530

Editeur : Georgetown University Press, 2024

Synopsis

For four thousand years, kings and queens ruled the known world. And for four thousand years, books have been written on leadership, strategy, and ethics to show how an ideal ruler acts. In these books, monarchs could see their own reflections in the ideal. Mirrors for Princes is the history of this genre of literature. Although mirrors for princes are now passé, their clichés live on in modern mirrors for managers. Today’s management theorists depict organizations as social bodies that exist to achieve shared goals. Actual organizations may not in fact have common goals, theorists concede, but they should. Therefore, they argue, organizations need transformational leaders, not mere transactional managers, to envision a shared purpose and inspire followers to place this common goal above their own. The rhetoric of common goals and transformational leadership has a pleasing resonance for top managers, affirming their authority, just as it did for kings and queens in mirrors for princes. Keeley’s goal is to sensitize readers to these clichés and to provide today’s business leaders with the tools to identify flawed management cliché’s and think more critically when reading business books. Mirrors for Princes concludes with an epilogue for writers of management literature, suggesting how organizational theorists and business ethicists might avoid replicating the clichés of mirrors for princes and managers by adopting a social-contract model of organizations.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Michael Keeley, PhD, emeritus professor of management at Loyola University Chicago, is the author of A Social-Contract Theory of Organizations (1988) and has published his research in top-tier journals in both management and business ethics.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Georgetown University Press
• Date d'édition: 2024
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1647125537
• ISBN 13: 9781647125530
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 408
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible