Winter 1980

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Leadership

by James McGregor Burns

Harper & Row, pb $7.95, hb $17.50

and

Servant Leadership

by Robert K. Greenleaf

Paulist Press, $10.95

Reviewed by Vernon C. Grounds

As America enters the 80s, what it needs most is-new sources of energy? A cooling off of its inflationary economy? Weaponny that will put it far ahead of the USSR in the arms race? No! According to Time (Aug. 6, 1979), America's greatest need today is leadership. Essayist Lance Morrow discusses this need in a cover story on "The Cry for Leadership." He recalls that five years ago Time in a similar article had said, "In the U.S. and around the world, there is a sense of diminished vision, of global problems that are overwhelming the capacity of leaders." A halfdecade later our problems have so multiplied in number, swollen in size, and increased in complexity that the cry for leadership may easily change into a frantic clamor for a strong man on horseback, a dictator who, like Hitler, will give unambiguous direction to a directionless nation . even if he marches it into the abyss.

Is it a coincidence, then, that lately books on leadership have been proliferating? Does this proliferation show that the dearth of leadership is being widely recognized? Is it an attempt to help meet a more-than-urgent need on every level of society? Whatever our guesses about this phenomenon, we can profit by interacting with two recent publications, neither of them written by an evangelical. (Anyone in quest of an able, informative, detailed treatment by an evangelical is advised to read Ted Engstrom's The Making of a Christian Leader.)

I

The first, entitled simply Leadership, is an impressive work of scholarship which runs more than 500 pages. Its author, distinguished historian James McGregor ...

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