Benton, D. A. (2003). Executive Charisma: Six Steps to Mastering the Art of Leadership. New York: McGraw-Hill. Charisma is revealed by people who exude self-confidence, style, composure, authority, and a boundless energy. Basically, this is a book about communication. Benton draws on interviews with more than 500 of the world's leading executives, studies conducted by dozens of leading universities and research centers, and her own experience as an executive development coach. Benton suggests that it is people skills that account for 85 percent of why you are able to get, keep, and move ahead in jobs. She not only justifies the value of basic communication courses and books, but she underscores the importance of improving both your interpersonal and public-speaking skills. This is a well-written, informative, no-nonsense guide that you'll enjoy reading.

Dotlich, David L., and Peter C. Cairo. Unnatural Leadership: Going Against Intuition and Experience to Develop Ten New Leadership Instincts. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass (A Wiley Company, 2002. The authors discuss the importance of unnatural leadership (UL), personal challenges for the UL, leading teams as an UL, and leading the organization as an UL. The authors are both executive coaches and educators, and here they describe the truth about being a real leader in a business environment that has been turned upside down by e-commerce, diversity, security concerns, globalization, and matrix structures. The UL—a style of leadership used by those who succeed in complicated business and people situations—maximizes leaders' strengths and acknowledges their weaknesses. This is a practical book that offers a simple program along with tips and techniques that will assist in getting things done, motivating and leading, dealing with weaknesses and impulses and challenging conventional wisdom about leadership.

Giuliani, Rudolph W. (with Ken Durson), Leadership. New York: Miramax Books (A division of Hyperion), 2002. Although this book is more about Giuliani's background and successes with numerous personal stories that are also prescriptive, you will learn, from his examples, a great deal about the core qualities required to be and the responsibilities of effective leaders. In this easy-to-read book, Giuliani demonstrates how the leadership skills he practices can be employed successfully by anyone who has to run anything. It is too bad that he didn't provide a final chapter in which he brought together the main principles, suggestions, and ideas about leadership that are, instead, interspersed throughout the book. His insights on public speaking are especially refreshing and motivating. The ideas here are all Giuliani's; there is no list of references or additional sources of information.

Hastings, W., & R. Potter. (2004). Trust me: Developing a Leadership Style People will Follow. Colorado Springs, CO: WaterBrook Press. The foundation belief of this book is that everyone can become a great leader; it is not something you are born with. The book has eight parts, with two chapters each: humility, development, commitment, focus, compassion, integrity, peacemaking, and endurance. If that sounds like character development, that is precisely what it is. The authors help you both understand leadership styles and how to develop one yourself. They assist you in grasping the importance of trust and the danger of fear, appreciating the benefits of humility, enduring the damaging effects of pride and despair, and developing other important leadership skills. This is a practical, well-written book full of examples, suggestions, qualities, and footnotes from all the popular books on leadership.

Kennedy, C. J. (2001). Generally Speaking. New York: Warner Books, Inc. Kennedy, the first woman, three-star general when she retired from the Army in June, 2000, was the highest ranking female officer of her time. Here, she gives specific and revealing insight into one of our country's most revered, misunderstood, and largest co-cultures—the military. As a woman, she shows how the military continues to evolve in its treatment of women, how it corrects its mistakes, how an officer conducts her daily life, and how an effective leader makes decisions, handles crises, and manages subordinates. This is a useful book, especially for those unfamiliar with military life and those interested in what women can do given persistence, principles, and personal resolve.

Lencioni, P. M. (2004). Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business. San Francisco: CA: Jossey-Bass. Lencioni, a management consultant, writes from the premise that meetings are boring and ineffective. He writes his response in the form of a fable (business fiction, he calls it). This is a story of Yip Software, a video game company, and the peril it faces during its acquisition by Playsoft, a larger rival. Yip's leader, Casey, is on the chopping block after a Playsoft representative sits in on a disastrously lethargic staff meeting which starts late and resolves nothing. With degrees in psychology, business, and filmmaking, the character Will devises ideas to fix Yip's meetings by adding both drama and structure that includes: staging a dramatic opening, mining for conflict, debating the issues, making informed decisions, checking-in on a daily basis with additional weekly tactical, monthly strategic, and quarterly off-site meetings. The ideas are solid and success-oriented, and the book is a quick read.

Greenhalgh, L. (2001). Managing Strategic Relationships: The Key to Business Success. New York: The Free Press (a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.). Most effective leaders today must be managers of others. Greenhalgh focuses on what managers need to know—and do—to be effective in their daily lives. He brings together perspectives from clinical psychology, economics, social psychology, anthropology, political science, organizational behavior, business history, sociology, legal studies, industrial psychology, labor studies, feminist studies, organization theory, and marketing. Greenhalgh claims that relational negotiations are crucial to managerial effectiveness, and this is precisely why his book treats negotiation in the transactional context, and why this book is so important for all leaders to read.

Hargrove, R. (2001). E-Leader: Reinventing Leadership in a Connected Economy. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishers. Hargrove contends that the most profound implication of the Internet revolution has to do with leadership. What is both interesting and useful in this book is the number of shifts leaders need to make to succeed in the new e-economy. Each chapter includes a shift from: (1) CEO as steward to CEO as entrepreneur, (2) game-player to game-changer, (3) top-down to lateral leadership, (4) production-builder-in-chief to brand-builder-in-chief, (5) a "me" point of view to a "you" point of view, (6) being a great e-tailer to being a great logistician, and (7) being a manager/technician to being a coach/mentor. With short sections, comfortable vocabulary, and sections that outline the changes necessary, this is a useful and insightful book.

Levine, S. R. (2004). The Six Fundamentals of Success: The Rules for Getting It Right for Yourself and Your Organization. New York: A Currency Book (Published by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.). Levine discusses the following six fundamentals: Make Sure You Add Value, Communicate Up and Down, Inside and Out, Know How to Deliver Results, Conduct Yourself and Your Business with Integrity, Invest in Relationships, and Gain Perspective. In just over 90, three-page, chapters, in this 213-page book, Levine offers reader-friendly advice and suggestions that make this book an invaluable reference and guide that can be read over-and-over for encouragement and motivation.

[No author]. (no date). Moduk V: Leading a Multicultural Organization. Retrieved January 27, 2005, from http:://p2001.health.org/Cti03/cti03ttl.htm. Although this module is intended for workshop participants, the information provided on leading a multicultural organization (pp. 6-8) is invaluable. Besides the simple observations, there is material on the three important considerations in developing empowering leadership—trust, power, and influence—as well as information on barriers to empowering leadership. There are many good insights here that would be important to anyone who must lead in a multicultural environment.

O'Connor, Sandra Day. The Majesty of the Law: Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice. New York: Random House, 2003. O'Connor discusses communication, culture, listening, language, power, and leadership—especially female leadership. Although there is a great deal of information on "Life On the Court," the history of the court, people who have helped shape the court, the legal profession, and the rule of law in the twenty-first century, there is an excellent part on "Women and the Law" in which she discusses women in society, the women's suffrage movement, women in judging, and women in power. There is so much information in the entire book about female leadership, that any woman who aspires to be a leader in our culture will find interesting, useful, and insightful information here.

[No author]. (no date). A Toolkit for Volunteer Leaders: Small Group Dynamics L-4. University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Retrieved January 27, 2005, from http://4h.unl.edu/volunteers/toolkit/small.htm. The article discusses communication, content versus process, decision influence, task versus relationship, roles, membership, feelings, norms, group atmosphere, and group maturity. There is an observation sheet, questions for discussion, guidelines for leading small-group discussions, as well as group techniques.