BOOK REVIEW: RICHARD DONKINreviews The Essential Bennis: Essays on Leadershipby Warren Bennis with Patricia Ward Biederman; Jossey-Bass; €30

SOME YEARS ago at a management conference I turned up early in the auditorium and sat in the front row next to the only other person there, an older man in a sports jacket. We struck up a conversation, or at least I did. I spoke and he listened.

As the room filled and the lights dimmed, he stepped on to the stage and began to speak. His name, I discovered, was Warren Bennis. We met on a number of subsequent occasions, when he spoke and I listened. Bennis has been demanding the attention of managers and academics for almost 50 years as a prolific author and theorist on leadership.

This retrospective of his life’s work, supported by a cluster of luminaries from management writers Charles Handy, Tom Peters and Rosabeth Moss Kanter to film star Glenn Close, brings together some of his most influential essays assembled from more than 26 books and 1,500 articles.

Bennis, an adviser to four US presidents, has lived long enough to see some of his prophecies take root. A 1964 Harvard Business Reviewarticle discussing "the inevitability of democracy", penned in the depths of the cold war, must have seemed wishful thinking to western business leaders and politicians at the time.

Much of his early research into training groups, or “T-groups” as they were called, not only shaped his thinking on leadership styles – persistently anti-authoritarian – but went on to reinforce later arguments stressing the need for greater workplace collaboration.

While his best-known book, On Becoming a Leader, will probably continue to be recognised as his master work, my own favourite, Organising Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration, co-authored with Patricia Ward Biederman, focused on the strengths and origins of great teams. This later book anticipated the flourishing of collaborative efforts that laid down the architecture for open-sourcing and information-sharing on a grand scale over the internet among the generation responsible for web 2.0.

Another seminal work was a 1966 article entitled “The Coming Death of Bureaucracy” in which he argued that command- and-control hierarchies would give way to more adaptive and fluid organisational systems.

While traditional companies cling to their hierarchies, even now, the old order is showing signs of crumbling under the pervasive influence of internet communications, creating what Bennis calls “global transparency” demanding more responsive, involved and aggregated leadership.

In fact, as this book demonstrates, it is impossible to read Bennis at length without noting that his greatest thrills have been achieved through creative collaboration in his own life and in recording the phenomenon when it has succeeded elsewhere, from the diverse achievements of the Bauhaus school and its influence on design to the terrible success of the Manhattan Project.

Management writer Tom Peters recalls how Bennis's work influenced his research with Robert Waterman that led to their best-selling In Search of Excellence, which observed the success of project teams in companies such as 3M and Hewlett-Packard.

“After my first book, I settled down in Silicon Valley for a wonderfully turbulent quarter century,” writes Peters, “and courtesy of the Apples and Electronic Arts and then of the Googles, watched the new organisation forms that Warren had foreseen in 1966, come of age.”

It can be no coincidence that Peters and Bennis shared similar military backgrounds as junior officers in the US army. This war experience of focusing on the practicalities of a task, while dealing with the frustrations of petty authority, led Bennis ultimately to forecast what he called in a 1997 essay “the death of the great man”.

“Given our continuing obsession with solitary genius, reflected in everything from the worship of film directors to our fascination with Bill Gates and other high-profile entrepreneurs, it is no surprise that we tend to underestimate just how much creative work is accomplished by groups,” he wrote.

The continuing cult of leadership means this prediction of reduced influence among anointed individuals has yet to become apparent. It might explain his essay on “followership”.

Following, he argues, should not be about nodding heads but about speaking out and dissent when decisions demand to be challenged.

“Perhaps the ultimate irony,” he writes, “is that the follower who is willing to speak out shows precisely the kind of initiative that leadership is made of.” – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009)