![]() ![]() They think of themselves modestly they often don't even think of themselves as leaders. They don't have the spotlight and publicity on them. They're often not at the top of organizations. They're not making high-stakes decisions. You also end up defining quiet leaders almost through a series of negatives. He pushes so hard he ends up committing suicide, is very disappointed in his kids-there are other characters, I noticed, who were what I came to call quiet leaders. And at the same time while you read books and plays- Death of a Salesman is such a clear example, where Willy wants to be a great salesman and he wants his sons to be leaders of men. There's the age-old myth of Icarus trying to fly too close to the sun, and there is the suggestion that there is something dangerous about the pursuit of greatness. Scott Fitzgerald: "Show me a hero and I'll tell you a tragedy." In the course, so many of the people in the works of fiction we read-who aspire to greatness or who achieve greatness-end up badly. So that was one question that was in my mind. Does this mean these people are on vacation the rest of the time? And there was a natural question: "Is this all there is to writing about difficult ethical decisions?" Or put differently, what happens in between the big decisions-which don't come along very often? For some people they come along very, very infrequently. One is that I had written a book called Defining Moments: When Managers Must Choose Between Right and Right (HBS Press, 1997) which is about big deal, high-stake, traumatic decisions. ![]() There were two things that prompted me to do so. What is a quiet leader? Is quiet leadership a topic you had been thinking about prior to the MBA course?īadaracco: I don't think I really started thinking about it until just a few years ago. Lagace: You write that one inspiration for your new book was the unusual course you've been teaching for MBA students on moral leadership in organizations. Badaracco recently sat down with HBS Working Knowledge Senior Editor Martha Lagace to talk about quiet leaders. In his new book Leading Quietly: An Unorthodox Guide to Doing the Right Thing (HBS Press, 2002), he describes what quiet leaders do and how they make their workplace, and their world, a better place. A quiet leader? Yet quiet leaders-managers who apply modesty, restraint, and tenacity to solve particularly difficult problems-are more common than we think, says Harvard Business School professor Joseph L. ![]()
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