About Leaders We Deserve

Leaders We Deserve is a website designed to stimulate discussion of leadership in various fields of human endeavour. The author works under the Blogname Tudor. This was a pseudonym chosen while the site was in its developmental stages in late 2006. More details can be found on the author’s wikipedia page.

A designated site

Leaders we deserve has been designated a preserved and select site by the British Library web archive. Its citation states

The individual contributors to the UK Web Archive select websites according to their own collection development policies and areas of expertise. Selected websites are considered to be of long term research value and are chosen to represent a subject of social, political, cultural, religious, scientific or economic significance and relevance to the UK. We also receive nominations from siteowners themselves and members of the public.

About Tudor

I set up Leaders We Deserve after a period of enforced medical leave from my work as a teacher, researcher, and writer into these and related topics. In earlier incarnations I worked at a medical school in New York, a research laboratory for a corporation, and founded a small (but perfectly formed) management consultancy.

When not Blogging or conducting duties as a Professor at an International Business school, I can be found enacting the roles of husband, sometime radio and TV pundit (mostly unpaid), enthusiastic but hapless social tennis player, enthusiastic and increasingly hapless competitive chess player, and sponsor of projects aimed at promoting applied research into leadership, creativity and related topics.

Leaders We Deserve: The Concept

The concept behind the Blog’s title is that leadership can be treated as a social concept. We create our leaders, and to some degree build them up and destroy them. In that sense, we are responsible for the influence that leaders exercise over the rest of us. If we understand more about this, we may better understand and mediate the behavior of leaders. (In very early post, someone rightly pointed out the importance of clarifying ‘who are the ‘we’ in all this.)

Four hundred posts later [2009] and I suppose the main clarification is that ‘we’ refers to those influenced by and influencing a leader or leaders in any situated leadership event.

My previous studies had been mainly of business leaders, but I could see how there could be some similarities, and some differences in the leadership stories in other fields, for example in politics, military and sporting endeavours.

Leaders We Deserve: The Web Site

Leaders We Deserve was initiated after encouragement from colleagues who had been exploring the way Blogs might support information and creativity management in public and private organisations. These discussions had prompted me to see whether I could apply their ideas in my own fields of interest. I had spent a considerable amount of time editing journals in the late 20th century The experiment seemed important at the start of the 21st Century.

My (blurred) vision was to produce something that would be an on-line version of collegiate meetings exploring the contemporary leadership stories, and using them to test various conceptual frames and models.

Within three weeks of start-up, the feedback (mostly from those who had encouraged me into starting the Blog) had more than whipped up my initial interest into something to which I had become more deeply committed. To borrow another term, I have found great satisfaction in becoming part of a community of learning.

Join Up

At this stage [2009] I am still excited at the prospects for the Blog and how it might develop. I’m not launching a marketing campaign with the aim of growing the site for the sake of growing the site. I look forward to contributions from now and future partners in this venture.

200,000 hits later …

..and updating the page, the original intention still holds, which shows admirable consistence of purpose but perhaps also a stubborn resistance to change established beliefs.

A historical note

There is an earlier text Leaders We Deserve by Dr Alistair Mant and which was mentioned in a post following a comment by Dr Mant [May 2007].

Leaders we deserve as an educational aid

In 2009, LWD became a resource for MBA students around the world, within the Manchester Business School WorldWide blended learning programmes. Posts are selected and changed regularly under the themes Perspectives of Leadership (POL) and Global Events and Leadership (GEL). A team of over a dozen tutors help in the delivery of the posts which are used in project work, assignments and examinations.