Road rules of great leaders ; The authors find some order in the universe of leadership, says Somnath Dasgupta.

The Leadership Code: Five Rules to Lead By

By Dave Ulrich, Norm Smallwood, Kate Sweetman

Publisher: Harvard Business Press

Pages: 190

Price: Rs 900

Leaders and leaderships, of corporations or countries, have comeinto much disrepute since the 2008 collapse of sparked a globalfinancial crisis. Many leaders turned out to be avaricious peopleresponsible for bringing down their companies, and they werefollowed by heartless leaders who eliminated thousands of jobs.Leaders of countries fared no better as they had to make tough cutsin government spending.

When The Leadership Code: Five Rules to Lead By, by Dave Ulrich,Norm Smallwood and Kate Sweetman, hit the stands in the West in 2009it had a technical flaw. It turned out that the authors had finishedwriting the book just before Lehman collapsed and the leadershipcrisis snowballed.

Kate Sweetman, one of the authors, who was in India recently,says the five rules survived the acid test. As for the leaders in ahurry to make money, she says: "I think that what they were doingwas kind of retracting in trying to make things work in the shortterm."

"We don't pretend to have come up with a new theory of leadershipor something like that. What we were really trying to do was to getsome order in the universe of leadership," Sweetman says. Thesubject is a "well-ploughed" field, but there is a lot of confusionaround it.

Typically, in a very large company with many divisions, theleaders of the different businesses could be all teaching differentstuff, she says. "That's because they sort of fall in love withemotional intelligence, or they fall in love with authenticleadership, or strategy stuff. none of it is wrong," she says. Buthow does it really help you compete? Does this code apply acrosscultures, for women and men?

"Leadership does not have a gender, and it does not have anationality. It does not have ethnicity. It is a person standing upand saying 'I want to do things differently'," she says. It is justthat no decision is made without an emotional component, and womenhave a larger emotional component, which is why differences are seenin the work place. But if you allow emotion into your thinking, youactually take better decisions, Sweetman says.

According to the authors, great leaders can be widely differentin their styles and the way they do things. But, drawing on theircollective research experience and interviews with all the thoughtleaders in their field, they concluded that all great leaders go byfive rules.

Rule 1: Shape the future. Leaders should have the vision to builda future for their organisation.

Rule 2: Make things happen. Just the vision is useless: Leadersmust also be able to execute today's plans . Rule 3: Engage today'stalent. Good leaders are good at communicating with their people andaligning the individual to the organisation.

Rule 4: Build the next generation. A good leader has to helppeople map their careers, find talent that can be developed fortomorrow's job, and encourage relationships.

Rule 5: Invest in yourself. A leader must "know himself", be ableto tolerate stress, think clearly and rise above the details.

There is no ranking of the rules: they are in four quadrants withRule 5 at the centre.