The End of Leadership

From one of the pioneers in the field of leadership studies comes a provocative reassessment of how people lead in the digital age: in The End of Leadership, Barbara Kellerman reveals a new way of thinking about leadership—and followership—in the twenty-first century. Building off of the strengths and insights of her work as a scholar and a teacher, Kellerman critically reexamines our most strongly-held assumptions about the role of leadership in driving success. Revealing which of our beliefs have become dangerously out-of-date thanks to advances in social media culture, she also calls into question the value of the so-called “leadership industry” itself. Asking whether leadership can truly be taught, Kellerman forces us to think critically and expansively about how to thrive as leaders in a global information age.

This essential work of management theory dismantles decades of dogma to ask the tough questions:

• The Leadership Industry: Why the multi-billion-dollar business of leadership development has failed to produce better leaders, and may have actually made things worse.
• The Rise of the Follower: A deep dive into the historical, cultural, and technological forces that have empowered followers and eroded the authority of those at the top.
• A Broken Social Contract: An analysis of how the unspoken agreement between the powerful and the powerless has been undermined, leaving both sides disillusioned.
• A New Paradigm for Power: A forward-looking framework for understanding leadership, followership, and context as an interconnected system in the digital age.