Leading Minds

"[Gardner's] books are lucid, cross-disciplinary examinations of heady topics: Creating Minds . . . and Leading Minds . . . are rarities, being academic studies that are as readable as they are compelling. (Indeed, Leading Minds was the No. 1 seller on the Globe's local best-seller list last week.)"

"At the heart of Gardner's thesis is a simple but unfamiliar idea, which forms the epigraph to one of the chapters: 'All leadership takes place through the communication of ideas to the minds of others.' . . . Armed with this idea of leadership Gardner is able to bring together leaders from very different fields, such disparate figures as Churchill, Einstein, the anthropologist Margaret Mead and Pope John XXIII. When viewed through the lens of the cognitive psychologist, they are all doing the same thing: all are telling, and embodying, stories."

"In general, business people should read a lot more. I find it dangerous that many CEOs have no idea of the historical context of what they do. One book I recommend is . . . Leading Minds by Howard Gardner, a psychologist who teaches at the Harvard School of Education. He looks at 11 great leaders throughout history, people like Martin Luther King Jr., Maggie Thatcher, Eleanor Roosevelt, Harriet Tubman and Gandhi."

"Well and clearly argued."

"Fascinating. . . . Gardner analyzes the life and times of 11 modern leaders in search of how they managed to change our world."

"A novel analysis of leadership.... The authors differentiate visionaries—leaders who create new stories, such as Gandhi and Jean Monnet, architect of a unified Europe—from such innovative leaders as Margaret Thatcher, who identify a theme latent in the population but neglected over the years and give it a new twist. Other leaders on whom they focus are George Marshall, Margaret Mead, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Pope John XXIII, former General Motors president Alfred P. Sloan Jr. and educator Robert Hutchins. This study will repay the close attention of aspiring leaders in many fields."

"A good test for me of a business book is whether I can remember anything important about it a couple of years after first reading it. . . . Leading Minds passes this test with flying colors. . . . Howard Gardner's striking insight, supported by his copious research, fed straight into my own thinking about brands."

"[A] fascinating exploration . . . [Leading Minds] establishes a convincing middle ground between numbingly quantified studies and the unbounded impressionistic interview. . . . [It] illuminates the need for leaders to understand that part of the human psyche that holds on to the childish view of the world that yearns for certainty, and not to pander to it."

"The gamut of psycho-socio-scientific analysis applied to [leadership] routinely obscures its underlying diverse human dynamic. Making strides to reverse this state of affairs, Howard Gardner constructs a richly textured guide to the realm in which that dynamic plays out—within and between the minds of leaders and followers.... Supplemented with a treasure trove of appendices, Gardner's compelling portraits of leaders' minds offer an original framework for the understanding of the leadership process."

"An imaginative book, filled with uncommon ideas."

"Howard Gardner has written another enthralling book. The eleven men and women he has chosen as his examples could hardly differ more widely, but Gardner has managed to define the common factors that made them all effective leaders."

"Immensely interesting, thought-provoking, and decidedly original. No one else could have written it."

"Once again, Howard Gardner illuminates for us a crucial aspect of human behavior. If, as he claims, great leaders achieve power through the stories they tell, Gardner's own fascinating narratives of leadership show why he is one of the intellectual leaders of our times."

"Once again, Gardner brings his brilliant intuition and analytic skills to the study of human excellence. His diagnoses are of particular value today, when great leaders are both badly needed and unaccountably scarce."

Of the many books that I've written during the past forty years, Leading Minds may seem to have involved the biggest leap. Before its publication, I saw myself, and was seen by others, as a psychologist studying human development, particularly in the cognitive sphere. I had written a dozen books about the human mind, more than half of them featuring the word "mind" in the title. Until the early 1980s, I was primarily a research psychologist, writing for other psychologists. But after the publication in 1983 of my book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, I became more focused on issues of education; indeed, the topics I wrote about, and the audience I was addressing, were drawn from the education sector.

Although I was initially unaware of it, the distinct lines of study I was pursuing almost simultaneously in Creating Minds and in The Unschooled Mind were destined to come together in Leading Minds. In this book I study a range of leaders from the last century in order to explicate what I see as the major facets of leadership, from the perspective of psychology. To summarize my formulation succinctly, a leader is an individual (or, rarely, a set of individuals) who significantly affects the thoughts, feelings, or behaviors of a significant number of individuals. Most acknowledged leaders—consider, for example, Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill—are "direct"; they address their public face-to-face. But I have called attention to a hitherto unrecognized phenomenon—indirect leadership: In this variety of leading, individuals exert impact through the works they create.

Upon publication of the book, a number of questions arose that I did not treat, or did not treat adequately, in the first edition. To begin with, I was asked about whether the choice of leaders did not reflect, chiefly, individuals whom I liked or admired. Certainly I prefer certain leaders to others, and my sample may be slanted to some extent in favor of individuals whom I admire. It is crucial, however, not to confuse the descriptive and the normative. My goal in Leading Minds is to describe features of effective leadership, irrespective of whether I happen to admire the individuals in question or the policies they promoted. Indeed, the analysis would be unacceptable as scholarship if it applies only to individuals for whom I have positive feelings. One purpose of the survey in the Appendix is to extend the framework to individuals, many of whom I, along with the rest of the world, consider loathsome.

Though the topic of leadership and the field of "leadership studies" certainly existed in earlier times, few could have been prepared for the explosion of interest in the topic of leadership in recent years. In all probability, my book was a symptom of this new interest, rather than a prod to it. The contributions of certain key scholars—Warren Bennis, James McGregor Burns, John Gardner, and Barbara Kellerman—were one ingredient. The increasing dominance of the business sector in America and other developed countries, and the crucial role of the CEO and other members of the leadership team, doubtless contributed as well. Greater awareness of global problems—for example, poverty, climate change, the treatment of disease, and corruption—and the difficulties involved in tackling them also brought to the fore the need for skilled, informed, and fair-minded leaders. The various traumas of the period—the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the financial meltdowns of 2000 and 2008, the instability of large portions of Africa and the Middle East—all called attention to the costs of poor or ineffective leaders.

Just as the political and economic spheres have been convulsed in recent decades, so, too, our world has been altered by technological, cultural, and even epistemological changes. I capture these changes by the trio of concepts of "truthiness," twaddle, and Twitter.