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Leadership BS

Jeffey Pfeffer | 52:58

Transcript

It is my absolute pleasure today to introduce you to Jeffrey Pfeffer. And Jeff is a professor at Stanford and a author slash co author of 14 books. Another one I understand in the making, so like 14 and a half books. And so he's got lots and lots of areas of expertise. And we're here today to talk about his latest book, leadership, Bs, which is nothing, if not catchy as a title.


And I am Karen, May, I lead our people development team here at Google. And I know we're joined not only by folks in the room here today, but also by a number of folks and other locations via livestream. So welcome all of you.


And I shared briefly with Jeff that a little bit of an embarrassing fact, which is that I don't read very many leadership books. And I tend to read the first chapter and feel like I kind of got the point and maybe read like the first paragraph of the rest of the chapters. And, you know, there tends to be a certain sameness. And so I, I left about that much time to read this book, which was no offense.


But what I found when I started reading is I kind of put my feet up on the couch and lean back and slow down. And I said, this is very interesting. This is really different. And, and so I was so pleased that I had the opportunity to directly ask you questions, because it was a very thought provoking book. And I know, we can't assume today that you've all had the chance to read it yet. I imagine many of you will, following our conversation, because you too, will be very intrigued. So I'd like to just start off with the first question, which as I shared with you, I'm, I'm very curious because you've, you've written at least two books in one, maybe three with this book. And two of the themes that you wove together.


One is essentially, excuse my paraphrase here, correct me if you like, is that the things that we say we want in our leaders are not necessarily the things that we get in our leaders, nor are they necessarily the things that are rewarded in our leaders. So we have a disconnect. Similarly, we have a multi billion dollar leadership development industry, which claims to help people develop into that former set of things that we say we want in our leaders, and yet doesn't do a good job of that.


And I'm so you have commentary on both of those states of affairs in this book. And I'm, I'm curious about your about why you wrote the book, and why you chose to address both of those important questions together. No, softball questions.


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