Reading 1 : Joanne Clulla, Leadership Ethics: Mapping the Territory (HEART) Discussion Point: I fully agree that ethics should be an important focal point in the study of leadership, but do we really have to Judge the leaders so harshly, and expect them to be perfect in all ethical and moral aspects? Does the personal charisma of a leader have an unfair impact on our Judgment of a leader? Also, at times, it seems the history and media seem to characterize and paint the Images of different leaders ased on different scales.While acknowledging that my knowledge of US politics might not be up to the mark, I believe both former Presidents Nixon and Clinton were accused of wrong-doings of comparable severity, but they seem to have totally different legacies.
Reading 2: Bad Leadership, Part 1: The Bad Side (pp. 3-50) (BAD) Discussion Point: How do we measure the virtues or true success of a leader such as the CEO of a huge corporation or the head of a state?It Is Imperative that students aspiring to become leaders in the future should study the failures and short-comings of past leaders. But, at the same time, by having an unbiased, consistent and reliable scale or score-card system In place to measure the "goodness" or virtues of a leader, and it acting as part of checks and balances mechanism, we should be able to pro- actively strive to reduce or avoid the possibility of a leader becoming a case-study of "bad leadership".
