Leading Minds

An Anatomy of Leadership

By: Howard Gardner

Narrated by: Peter Johnson

Length: 14 hrs and 38 mins

Publisher's summary

In Leading Minds, Gardner and his research associate at Harvard Project Zero, Emma Laskin, apply a cognitive lens to leadership, drawing on Gardner's groundbreaking work on intelligence and creativity to offer fascinating revelations about the minds of leaders and those who follow them. This reissue includes a new introduction by the author.

©2011 Howard Gardner (P)2011 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"The authors differentiate visionaries - leaders who create new stories, such as Gandhi and Jean Monnet, architect of a unified Europe - from such innovative leaders as Margaret Thatcher, who identify a theme latent in the population but neglected over the years and give it a new twist. Other leaders on whom they focus are George Marshall, Margaret Mead, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Pope John XXIII, former General Motors president Alfred P. Sloan Jr. and educator Robert Hutchins. This study will repay the close attention of aspiring leaders in many fields." ( Publishers Weekly)

Not Very Meaty Collection of Shallow Biographies

I read as far as Eleanor Roosevelt and decided there was not enough new substance or analysis to inspire me to go on. I wrote down a few insights from the earlier chapters, but this book is primarily a collection of introductory biographies on the included persons.

Audible speaker is fine, but the delivery and content is somewhat flat. There are other books I would rather read. Disappointed as I am a long-term fan of the Theory of Multiple Intelligences.

More like a PhD dissertation

The Author uses I way too much, And as a leader presenting information to his followers goes against what he has learned about the idea of using stories. You can do a lot better to learn about leadership by reading other books than this one.

Get the hardcopy

Found the audible book difficult to follow the various concepts. Might be better to get the hardcopy.

Great overview of leadership

Would love to hear an updated version of this book with more emphasis of the phycology of the times and how that has played a role in what we consider “leadership”.

Good content, struggle to finish

Good content but could have conveyed the same information with much fewer and simpler wordings.

Subjective and Arbitrary

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

Nothing!

What was most disappointing about Howard Gardner’s story?

Lack of empirical evidence for his claims!

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

Disappointment, of course!

Any additional comments?

The books is subject to availability bias in that the author has singled out individuals that he has found exceptional in his course of life, without any scientific sampling technique, as extraordinary leaders—yet others may not find them EXTRAORDINARY at all! Further, he has explored their lives in separate chapters with stories that have already been extensively covered in the media through an overly-optimistic academic view.