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Jack Gordon (Editor). The Pfeiffer Book of Successful Leadership Development Tools. San Francisco: Pfeiffer, 2008, 464 pages, $35.00 softcover.
The Pfeiffer Book of Successful Leadership Development Tools is organized into three sections: "Presentations and Discussion Resources," "Experiential Learning Activities," and "Inventories, Questionnaires, and Surveys." Persuasion and building and maintaining credibility are central themes of the book; it is hard to argue with those as core leadership skills. Overall, the book is well organized and likely to be useful to the target authence: training facilitators.
Section I (Presentations and Discussion Resources) consists of chapters that each either provide a foundation for, or a supplement to, remainder of the book. There are some expected choices in this section, such as the chapter about management and organizational theorists. are also some surprising choices, such as the chapter about from the Gestalt perspective. There were also omissions, such as information about the process of leadership development. Lewin (1951) claimed that nothing is as practical as a good theory; however, this book does spend much time on theory. Indeed, Gordon is explicit about a bias toward practicality over theory. Although the dichotomy of theory and practice is common, I had hoped a book such as this would offer more integration. Another surprising aspect of this section was the amount of space dedicated to management theory rather than to leadership theory. the two do not inhabit mutually exclusive space, it was interesting the choice was to focus on management over leadership, particularly for book with leadership in the title. The chapters provide helpful information, but it would have been more helpful to explicitly connect the chapters in this section with the experiential activities in the next, perhaps via a linking the two so that users could combine them more easily in training situations.
Section II (Experiential Learning Activities) is further divided three subsections focused on "Style and Approach," "Organizations Systems," and "Skill Building." Each of the 19 entries describing experiential activities provides the goals, group size, time requirements, materials needed, physical setting, process, and possible variations of...