The Work of Public Leadership

This is a book about public leadership. That fact alone sets it apart from the bulk of the leadership literature, which is focused on corporate or organizational leadership. These insights cannot simply be transplanted into the public sector context. The pressures of expectations and responsibilities that both types of leaders face are not perhaps wholly dissimilar. The spheres in which they operate are distinct but inevitably intertwined in important ways, yet their craft and the conditions under which they practice it are fundamentally different in important respects. I shall not repeat all the familiar arguments made in support of this contention. They boil down to the one key point: public and private leadership perform fundamentally different functions in society, and because this is so, public and private leaders are subject to fundamentally different incentive structures and accountability regimes.