Thoughts On Leadership

Thoughts on Leadership, Revisited

      The topic I have chosen for this writing assignment is Leadership. While the overall subject of Leadership is extremely broad, I will speak mainly on the idea of leadership in organizations and the components of leadership that affect the organizations progress. The counter argument of my thesis being that too much leadership is the same as no leadership at all. It could be said that Organizations that fail do so for a couple of reasons, typically, financial ones. But if looked at closely, I believe one could also derive that an overall lack of leadership was involved with the failure or mismanagement of the finances of the organization. Money doesn’t fail people, neglecting to manage money fails people.
      Hypothesis: While the “Too many chiefs and not enough Indians” problem with organization can be and often is counterproductive, leadership is an essential component in any organization that without it, cannot survive due to lack of the critical elements that leadership provides. Namely, leadership in any organization provides clarity of purpose, motivation to succeed, and vision and end state.
      For this thesis I will use online research as my main source of information. Using a combination of the Ashford Library, and Resource Center, I should be able to drum up a significant volume of sources. Leadership is a topic that has been studied in detail since the time of Julius Caesar. There is no shortage of sources on the topic that I can tap into for supporting documentation. Additionally, I expect to inject considerable personal experience into this paper based on my 21 years of military service.




      I have been a student of leadership since 1989, when I first joined the Army at the age of seventeen. When I was young my vision of leadership was very shllow. I used to look at people like Lieutenant Audie Murphy and Sergeant Alvin York and think that they were great leaders not for how they lived their...