There are many aphorisms and assumptions surrounding leadership - which of them can be relied upon? Can we identify the qualities that make a good leader?

Are the characteristics that make a leader unchanging throughout time? Are leadership styles influenced by a person's background or sex? In short, are leaders born or bred?

This book presents current thinking about the phenomenon of leadership with nearly 100 articles from leading authorities including:

• Rosabeth Moss Kanter
• John Harvey-Jones
• Tom Peters
• Peter Drucker
• Charles Handy
• John Katter
• Meredith Belbin

Whether you study leaders, aspire to be one, or have to pot and develop the leaders of tomorrow the book will be enlightening reading.

Ethics and leadership; women as leaders; leading in a crisi; and leadership in a global market-place - these are some of the many topics covered in the book. A separate section discusses how leaders are developed and how changing attitudes to what sort of leaders we now require have affected approaches and techniques.

"Leadership is an endless subject and endlessly interesting because you can never get your conceptual arms around it" says Warren Bennin, world authority on leadership. Discover how he and other distinguished consultants, business people and academics have tried and succeeded.

Michael Syrett and Clare Hogg are established business journalists and commentators. For over twelve years, they have written on organizational and management education issues for leading journals such as International Management, Director, Management Today, Eurobusiness and Personnel Management, as well as leading UK national newspapers such as the Financial Times, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and The Times