Acknowledgments

The creation of this book required the help of many people. As such, we owe a collective debt of gratitude to a wide range of friends, colleagues, and generous practitioners who shared their wisdom, helped us get smarter about leadership, and supported us through the journey from rough outline to final production.

The Leader’s Handbook project began with a brainstorming session between the two of us and our HBR editor, Ania Wieckowski. As the concept developed, Ania went on to become not just an editor, but a true partner. She tirelessly and collaboratively kept us on track through many months, while also diligently challenging us to keep improving the presentation of our ideas. Several of Ania’s HBR colleagues also contributed by sharing their perspectives about key trends and enduring tenets of management, as regularly published in the magazine and on the HBR website. Thanks also to Jane Gebhart, whose careful work as our copy editor ensured a higher standard of consistency and quality in the pages that follow, and to Anne Starr, our production editor, who shepherded the manuscript through to completion.

We also want to express our appreciation to several dozen practicing leaders, both entrepreneurs and more established executives, who shared their leadership experiences and insights with us through interviews over the last eighteen months (we list them at the end of this section). Our conversations with these practitioners sharpened our understanding of real-world organizational challenges and enriched our ability to discuss the fundamentals of leadership on which this book has been based. Several of their stories and verbatim reflections appear throughout the chapters, but whether quoted or not, these leaders universally contributed to the development of our thinking about the essential practices of this handbook. We were pleased, as the research unfolded, how often our leader interviews generally affirmed the overall thesis of this book, but we should also add that nothing in its pages is intended to ascribe a specific view of leadership to anyone except ourselves.

We would be remiss if we also did not thank the many clients and organizations that we had the opportunity to work with over the past thirty years of our own consulting and leadership practices. In many ways, this book was a capstone project that allowed us to reflect on and pull together the learning that we accumulated from these collaborations. Some of their stories also are captured in the preceding pages.

It may seem self-serving for coauthors to thank one another, but as a sort of collegial epilogue, we would like to close our collective acknowledgments with gratitude for the value of the collaboration that developed during the course of writing a book together. We began the first draft with a fair amount of conceptual consensus between us, but then had plenty of disagreements and debates along the way. Though sometimes painful, in the end they were, again and again, “learning opportunities.” We are each better and wiser for the exchanges that culminated in the final product, and more important, we think this handbook is too.

As coauthors, each of us also would like to note a few personal acknowledgments:

RON: Over the past four decades, colleagues at Schaffer Consulting have deeply influenced my perspective on organizational change and leadership, and supported my professional development. So in many ways, this book is a reflection of what I learned during my time as an active member of the firm. Thanks in particular to Robert Schaffer, who took a chance on me as a naïve would-be consultant and continually encouraged me to keep learning and writing about what it takes for organizations and leaders to be successful. Thanks as well to longtime colleagues Suzanne Francis, Matthew McCreight, Nadim Matta, and others from the firm who were great learning partners over the years. I also wish to acknowledge the many professional colleagues from other firms and universities that I collaborated with on large-scale change projects, postmerger integrations, and previous articles and books. This handbook would not have been possible without the foundation that they provided.

Finally I would like to thank my family for all of their support and understanding while I was preoccupied with the research and writing that went into this book. My adult children (Eliora, Shira, and Ari) and their spouses (Elie, Ben, and Rebecca) continually asked me about the project and cheered me along, despite my having less time for helping out with their growing families or for talking with them about their professional and personal aspirations. Fortunately my wife, Barbara, stepped into the breach and more than made up for my lack of availability. Barbara also encouraged me to keep going whenever I was frustrated or blocked, celebrated with me at key milestones, and provided the steady and loving presence that allowed me to complete this project. As with my other books, I couldn’t have done it without her. She is the true leader in our family.

BROOK: I would like to thank colleagues, friends, and family who have, over decades of work in both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors, supported or contributed to my own work on leadership. Too numerous to name are the many professionals with whom, over the years, I have worked and learned about leadership, both as a member of an organization (CBS Inc., McKinsey & Co., Saba Software, United Way Worldwide) and as an adviser and coach to many others as clients. I also gained invaluable insights in recent years from my three adult children (Sabrina, Laura, Martin) and their spouses (Michael, Brian, and Elise)—all of whom are rising leaders in their own professions. They helpfully shared relevant stories from their work experiences with me, which stimulated my thinking; and they variously commented more specifically on parts of our manuscript, which continued to ground me in issues critical for today’s early-career professionals. And finally I lovingly thank my wife and life partner, Margarita, whose consistent support and patience with me through many years has enabled me to write now “yet another book.”