WOUNDED LEADERS:
HOW THEIR DAMAGED PAST
AFFECTS YOUR FUTURE
By
Allan Bonner, BA, BEAD, MA,
MSc, DBA, LLM, MScPl (Cand.)
Wounded Leaders: How Their Damaged Past Affects Your Future
First printing, June, 2014
Published by Sextant Publishing, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
©Allan Bonner, BA,BEAD,MA, MSc,DBA,LLM, MScPI (Cand.)
All rights reserved.The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law and is forbidden.
ISBN:978-1-926755-05-2
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Praise for
Allan Bonner's
Wounded Leaders
Good leadership is the glue that bonds a successful organization into a cohesive whole, from top to bottom. And good leadership, as capably described by Allan Bonner in this book, is not something that you're born with; it is a quality that successful leaders-civilian and military-have learned, developed, nurtured and applied to the best advantage and to the betterment of the organizations to which they have dedicated themselves. Those who would aspire to become capable and respected leaders have much to learn from those who have succeeded, but they also have much to learn from this book. In particular, they will benefit significantly from the wise counsel that it offers on various types of leadership and the weight of importance that it gives to listening as well as providing guidance and positive influence. Indeed, and in my experience, the best leaders are those that have mastered the art of communication-both ways.
Ray Henault
Gen (Ret'd)
Former Chief of the Defence Staff, and
Former Chairman of the NATO Military Committee
"Forceful, insightful and practical...
and, on top of that, a very good read."
Aram Bakshian, Jr.,
Founding Editor of American Speaker and Director of
Presidential Speech-writing for Ronald Reagan
"...Allan Bonner applies a lifetime of astute observation, involvement, and critical, scholarly thinking to the very practical matter of why businesses fail to meet their goals."
Dr. Joseph C. Braun
Argonne Nuclear laboratory
"The amalgamation of modern western psychology and ancient eastern martial arts philosophy has been the cornerstone of the curriculum I have promoted for many years. Again I turn with special trust and confidence to Dr. Allan Bonner and this, his latest work, which will serve as an inspiration to me, and an instalment to my own research and reference library."
Detective James Shanahan
Police Academy City of New York
"Is morality a necessary part of leadership? Should a leader be hard-driving? With more and more regions and countries joining the still evolving global market... the rules will change."
Rodney Moore
Former External Affairs speech-writing Attache, as well as Press Secretary, to Governors-General Michener and Leger at Government house, Ottawa; then Assistant Press Secretary to The Queen at Buckingham Palace (1974-1977), at the same time also Press Secretary to The Duke of Edinburgh, The Prince of Wales and The Princess Anne; later Political Counsellor at the Canadian Embassy, Saudi Arabia; and Official Spokesperson for the Canadian Embassy, Washington, covering the 9/11 period.
FOREWORD
I came to know Allan Bonner through a series of training courses that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) conducts around the world to help promote the safety and good management of nuclear power plants and nuclear facilities. I have organized a number of these courses at the Argonne National Laboratory located near Chicago, Illinois in the U.S.A. Allan has lectured in many of these courses, and I had come to look forward to his exciting and dynamic presentations on the importance of good facility management and the need for developing good relations with the public-especially people who live in the vicinity of these large plants. When he told me that he was working on a new book on the topic of leadership, I immediately asked to see an advanced copy, hoping that it would lead to new lectures by him.
I have read other books by Allan Bonner, and they are all written in a crisp, succinct style that drives home a sequence of thoughts, ideas and concepts, in a manner not unlike the SOCKOs method that he advocates. Bonner likes to select a bite-sized topic and present it with both scholarship and style in a way that it is both enjoyable and memorable. In his new book,Wounded Leaders, he uses this writing style to identify a serious and growing problem that is plaguing the world of business.
There are many books today that talk about success in business. Bonner has chosen to approach this topic through the ‘back door’ and talk rather about the epidemic of failures-sometimes catastrophic-that we have seen in the recent recession and which continue to the present. We tend to ascribe much of the credit (or blame) for a company’s success (or failure) to the goals, strategies, tactics and style employed by the company leaders.
Regarding failures or lacklustre performance, he asks, “Why do so many business leaders fail to recognize the danger signs that prevent them from reaching their full personal and corporate potential?” In this book he whisks through an extensive list of findings and examples that he learned of while conducting his doctoral research on the topic of leadership. He offers a number of cases and vignettes that might explain the shortcomings of corporate leadership. Several of these stand out-the case of the wounded child who eventually becomes a wounded leader who goes on to head the wounded organization. Much wasted time, energy, inefficiency, and loss of productivity, stems from these wounded leaders. In searching for the roots of these problems, Bonner finds a shocking lack of traditional values: hard work, short turnaround times, respect for tradition and rank, humility, clean simple living, and an old term that has taken on a new meaning-followership-the capacity to learn from others.
Bonner seeks to find a model organization, that works well and implements the traditional values that he cherishes.