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The Tao of Leadership: Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching Adapted for a New Age by John Heider. Atlanta, GA: Humanics New Age, 1997, 161 pp., $16.95, paper [ISBN: 0-89334-079-0].
Amazingly enough, there is a new way to manage. It is strange but true. Well, it is not exactly new. More like very old, so old the new country of America doesn't know it. It is the Tao, or the way. It is a perspective, an approach, a letting go. It is not really an idea, but one could build many ideas around it. One could create a philosophy to describe it. One could even come up with a set of guidelines to manage by. But still, it is an easing of effort, a rising of viewpoint, and an understanding of the push-me-pull-you nature of human relationships.
The Tao of Leadership is a dehydrated version of an eighty chapter, 2500-- year-old document. The efficiency-oriented westerner only has to read 160 pages, and half of them are pictures. But try reading all eighty pages in one evening, or forty pages, or even twenty. It is hard to read five. One page is confusing, thoughtprovoking, and breaks apart our precepts of management. Reading the Tao of Leadership is like breaking the eggs of our wisdom.
The Tao of Leadership is taken from an old Chinese text written by Lao Tzu. The original work has three parts: (1) how things happen, (2) a way of life, and (3) a method of leadership. In summarizing the chapters, our modern writer introduces us to the Tao, makes suggestions for understanding it, and then leaves us with some guidance for managing according to the principle of Tao.
First, the leader needs to be conscious of what is happening in the group, but not coercive.
The wise leader knows what is happening in a group by being aware of what is happening here and now. This...