Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense

8

Are Great Leaders in Control of Their Companies?

WE ARE OBSESSED with leadership. Thousands of studies and books are already devoted to it, and we still want more. In 1990, Bernard Bass published the Handbook of Leadership, which ran over 1,000 pages and contained over 7,500 references to past research on the topic.¹ Even that heroic effort omitted much leadership research. In 2004, the four-volume Encyclopedia of Leadership was published. It runs 2,120 pages, contains hundreds of articles written by over 400 “leading scholars and experts,” and will cost you a staggering $595.² This massive tome also covers only part of the territory. Our search of Business Source Premier, a database of management periodicals, revealed that nearly 15,000 peer-reviewed ...