Interesting, but who is leading who?

The Life: Bookshops are full of leadership titles these days. Leadership: All You Need to Know promises a lot. But does it deliver?

Leadership: All You Need to Know by David Pendleton & Adrian Furnham

Walk into a branch of Magrudy's, Jashanmal - or any airport bookshop for that matter - and you will find a bewildering array of leadership titles.

So it was with some trepidation that I agreed to review Leadership: All You Need to Know.

What sets this particular book apart from its competitors is that it was written by academics, not another self-styled leadership guru.

Business books penned by professors can be a little on the dry side, but this one starts well, explaining in the introduction that the original working title for the book was "We Don't Need Another Hero" - a much more interesting proposition. The authors explain that their publisher persuaded them to change the title to signpost their intention to be "evidence-based, conceptually coherent and entirely practical". And it was a good call, on balance.

The opening chapter begins by posing an age-old question: what makes a good leader?

But unfortunately it then goes on to chart the rather dull history of the theory of leadership. The second chapter lists some of the research at breakneck speed, followed by a third setting out their own model.

However, if non-academics manage to make it throu gh those first few chapters they will be pleasantly surprised because there are some interesting anecdotes, including one about why the former IBM chief executive James Watson kept an intern on after he lost the company US$10 million (Dh36.7m).

The computer company executive took a personal interest in the graduates he recruited and wrote down the money as an "educating" experience for the intern.

It also tackles topics such as the impact of personality on leadership. For the record, successful leaders tend to be "stable, medium or high in conscientiousness, openness and extraversion and medium to low in agreeableness".

Leaders whose personalities are not suited to the task can learn to do the right things to a degree, they add, saying: "Personality is not a prison or a straightjacket."

Parts of the book are a good read, but the way it switches between an academic style and one with a broader appeal leaves you wondering who it is aimed at.