Byron Murray's Page

Byron,

My dissertation work was a content analysis of 1500 pages of text to see if she was talking about leadership. ( I scanned and did coding of all published writings from Speaker of the House to Freedom and Coordination). It took 6 months. I have lots of data that I could still mine for serious inquiry.

In a nutshell, I concluded that over time she stumbled into a leadership theory before it was in vogue or even discussed. I think that she is describing effective leadership for then and now before we thought of leadership an anything other than a personality trait or the domain of a precious few men. She was remarkable in her prophetic insights and suggested that the "great man" was a myth when it comes to understanding leadership.

I am also 99.9% sure that she coined the term followership as well...long before it was a word in our lexicon. She was a systems thinker before we had that, she has elements of chaos theory, she was a TQM proponent before it emerged, and the first to discuss the concepts of shared leadership, authority up and down the line, the key role of the group without losing the individual etc. I peruse the leadership lit and she is rarely if ever cited as a pioneer (unless of course you are reading Prophet of Managment) and possibly one or two other books. There are so many firsts as it relates to leadership theory that it's almost crazy!

I could go on and on....but must get back to work for now. I work with a non profit group that is going through tremedous upheaval -- and I am trying to help keep us afloat as we adapt to the new world we are finding each day. It's called the Leading Edge Institute (www.leadingedgeinst.org)

Ciao,

Suzanne