Warren Benniss

Warren Bennis was a scholar, author, educator and organizational consultant. He is viewed as the pioneer in the field of leadership studies. He delineated leadership as the capacity to translate vision to reality. He clearly differentiated it from management. According to him, leaders do the right thing, unlike managers who are more focused on doing the right things. Leaders are visionaries who are capable of aligning the energies and efforts of others behind their vision. Leaders communicate their vision and goals to others so effectively that those goals became theirs too. He claimed that leaders were not people who were in charge for the control and ‘personal exhilaration’ associated with it. On the other hand, leaders were people who have profound impact on other people’s lives, sometimes for ever. Bennis claimed that effective leadership had several purposes and goals, the consequence of leaders on their followers make it necessary that they are understood clearly.

Oftentimes, the perceived quality of the people at the top of an organization heavily influences its success or failure, to the extent that the image portrayed by corporate leadership affects stock prices of organizations. Hence another goal of effective leadership is to portray the right image to the public. In a world where the only constant is change itself, organizations

They need to make the followers believe that the vision is worth buying into, and that they will be better off by following. This involves building trust with the followers, as well as searching for self-knowledge and self-regard. While the latter is hard and takes courage and determination, Bennis believed that a person becomes a leader only when they decide for themselves how to