Three Ways to Read this Book
A Tiny Guide to Getting the Most Out of Too Many Words
This book is a set of interconnected essays. Together, they present a whole that’s (hopefully) larger than the sum of the parts, a unified theory and practice of leadership. I surely won’t succeed at that task — more about that in a second. First, you can think of this book as a crash course in leadership fit for a better tomorrow. Not just idle theorizing, but practice, purpose, lessons with a point.
The first two essays, Why We Desperately Need Leadership and Is Leadership Broken? make the case for reinventing and reimagining leadership. They’re what you might call Introductory Leadership.
The next five essays, Why The World Needs Truer Leaders, Wiser Leaders, Greater Leaders, More Effective Leaders, and Worthier Leaders, offer my tiny theory of leadership reimagined. They’re what you might call Intermediate Leadership.
The next eight, What Does a Leader Make?, How Establishments Fall?, How Totalitarianism Rises, The Economics of Decline, The Leader Versus the Demagogue, The Road to Ruin, and How This Generation of Leaders Failed Leadership are about the social, economic, and political construction of leadership. Leadership, after all, is a phenomenon that’s about each of those. They’re what you might call Advanced Leadership.
There’s no right or wrong way to read this book. Yet, while it’s easy to publish essays or blog posts online, publishing books online is an infant art. Structure, sequence, and connectedness get lost from page to screen. Readers, liberated from the tyranny of order, win freedom, convenience, and disposability.
So while I’ve tried to make this as reader friendly as possible, still, there are better and worse ways to read it. You’ll probably get the most out of it if you read it in the order I’ve arranged it in. Each essay builds on the next, so that by the end you’ll have something like a ladder you can use to climb to the top of Mount Leadership. Thus, if you want to master its lessons, while casual readers are certainly welcome to jump around from rung to rung, you’re probably best off climbing the ladder I’ve already built for you.
Those are two ways to read this book structurally. Here’s one way not to read it functionally. A mindset that I hope you won’t bring with you: perfectionism.
I’m going to try to offer you a reimagined theory of leadership — but I surely won’t succeed at doing so. The essays herein barely skim the surface of boundless oceans. I could write a book about each of the essays herein (and hopefully others will). Yet, I think it’s urgent for us to begin discussing the issues a troubled world is confronted with now. Hence, my purpose isn’t to write the book about leadership — but merely to illuminate, in the tiniest and humblest way, a path forward.
So read these essays with an open, clear, calm mind. Let them spark questions, thoughts, ideas. Reflect patiently, consider, ruminate. Let us not get bogged down in consensus-seeking internet-wars about “agreement” and “disagreement” — but instead together see if we can find footing on the path to the future. Thus, I don’t pretend to have all, or even any, of the answers — my role and goal here is simply to guide towards more useful questions.
Read it not as a description of the world to come, but as a manifesto for becoming the leader you can become – the very one the world desperately needs.
Umair
London
March 2016
