About the book

The central argument

From the Introduction

The one big thing that runs through twenty years of research, is that strategy and leadership are fundamentally narrative in character. Far from being just one of many tools available to leaders, narrative is the medium through which strategy becomes shared and change becomes intelligible. Narrative is how leadership becomes real both to those enacting leadership and to their followers.

Incremental change, and the other kind

The Introduction sets up the distinction the rest of the book depends on, using two metaphors: a castle defended against attack, and a microscope brought slowly into focus.

From the Introduction

Incremental change is adjusting what an organisation does. Transformational change alters what an organisation is. From the perspective of leadership-as-narrative, the first requires better execution of an existing story or refinement. The second requires a new story, because the old one no longer accounts for what people are being asked to do or to be.

What is distinctive

The Introduction sets out three contributions. The first is the constitutive claim itself:

From the Introduction

They imply that a leader exists independently from the stories they tell; that leadership is something decided or done first and communicated second. Rethinking leadership so that we see it in terms of leadership-as-narrative shows this underestimates the role stories play in organisational life. … Another more simple way to express this view is that there are no story-free zones in organisations.

The second is the political work done by the vocabulary of leadership:

From the Introduction

Naming someone leader is similar to using a strong plot – it opens up a hero slot that naturalises hierarchy and makes some forms of power and resistance harder to see.

The third is that the book is deliberately multidisciplinary, integrating philosophy of ethics and rhetoric with narrative theory, sociology and geography — with Aristotle's practical philosophy running throughout.

Who it is for

From the Introduction

Executives, public servants, those working in the third sector, and anyone who might be called a leader or follower will struggle daily with the narrative challenges this book addresses. … In order to do this, at times the book needs to feel less like a monograph and more like a conversation.

What kind of book this is

From the Introduction

It is not a how-to manual promising leadership success through recipes and formulas that make them better storytellers. Both narrative and leadership are too contextual, too complex, and too contested for formulaic application. … Instead, it is an argument: a sustained case that placing narrative first transforms how we understand, practise, study, and develop leadership.

The seven chapters

Introduction: Rethinking Leadership

The constitutive claim, the castle and the microscope, the hedgehog and the fox, and a note on AI as a flattering mirror. Read more

One: Rhetoric

Rhetorical formats, aphorisms, enthymeme, defamiliarisation, Propp, digression — applied to NHS policy, evidence-based management and the 2007 iPhone launch. Read more

Two: Character

Character as cultivated habit and as narrative role; the meaning void; impossible tasks; how managers emplot change before it happens. Read more

Three: Naming

What the word leader does, how far it has spread, and why the choice between leader and manager is political rather than terminological. Read more

Four: Figure-Ground

Elias on figuration, Lefebvre on the production of space, and the leadership act that consists in refusing to resolve. Read more

Five: Method

Four stances — Proppian analysis, ethnography, the storytelling halo and Foucauldian archaeology — with what each finds and cannot find. Read more

Six: Ethics

Duty, consequences and virtue — and the case for judging agents over time rather than acts in isolation. Read more

Seven: Application

Telling, replotting and reading: three positions, each with its own tools and its own ethical obligations. Read more

How to use it

Practitioners in a live situation may want to read Chapter Seven first and work backwards to whichever lens their situation demands. Readers coming for the argument should read in order: the chapters build. Researchers will find Chapter Five the most immediately usable, and teachers will find the cases recur across chapters deliberately, which makes them well suited to comparative seminar work.

Publication details

Title

Rethinking Leadership

Author

Professor Kevin Morrell, Rowlands Chair in Transformational Strategy, Cranfield School of Management

Publisher

Edward Elgar Publishing

Copyright

The book is the copyright of its author and publisher. This site paraphrases the argument in copy written for the web; it does not reproduce chapters or substantial extracts, and it is not a substitute for reading the book. Third-party works discussed in the book remain the property of their rights holders.

Status: paraphrased from the manuscript · author review required · publication details are placeholders