About the book

The central argument

Narrative is not a communication technique applied once strategy has been formulated. It is part of the medium through which strategy becomes shared, change becomes intelligible, people are positioned as characters, authority is legitimated and leadership becomes socially real. Leaders do things that are not stories, and structural conditions constrain what is possible — but how those actions are understood and made consequential always runs through narrative. There are no story-free zones in organisations.

What is distinctive

1. Constitutive rather than instrumental. Most existing work positions storytelling as a tool for achieving other objectives, which implies a leader who exists prior to and separately from the stories they tell. This book treats that dualism as the problem.
2. The political work of naming. The stories leaders tell are not the only stories that matter. The story embedded in the word leader does at least as much work — installing hierarchy, individualising collective action and making certain forms of power harder to see.
3. Classical resources, seriously used. Aristotle on rhetoric, character, emotion and practical wisdom, integrated with contemporary narrative theory rather than cited decoratively.

Who it is for

Senior executives, managers and organisational leaders; public servants and third-sector leaders; coaches, mentors and facilitators; board members, investors and advisers; employees and the people described as followers; executive-education participants and postgraduate students; and academics researching leadership, strategy, organisation, narrative and rhetoric.

The voice is deliberately first-person and accessible, with references kept light in the main text and fuller citation reserved for those who want to follow up. Specialist vocabulary — enthymeme, defamiliarisation, emplotment — is introduced and explained rather than avoided, on the grounds that these terms are indispensable if the argument is taken seriously.

What it is not

It is not a how-to manual promising leadership success through formulas for better storytelling: both narrative and leadership are too contextual, too complex and too contested for that. Nor is it a comprehensive literature review — in keeping with the series, it focuses on the author's own research. It is an argument.

The six 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

Close reading, emplotment analysis, structural analysis, discourse analysis and archaeology — with what each finds and cannot find. Read more

Six: 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 Six 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