Simon Rycraft Executive Science: Make Following You Inevitable (English Edition) lit

Most leadership books tell you what great leaders do. This one asks a harder question: what does the evidence actually show?

Executive Science gives each chapter to a researcher who did the foundational work, traces where the idea came from, what it genuinely established, and where the popular version parted ways with the original findings.

Eight chapters. Eight researchers. A century of evidence hiding in plain sight.

Wilfred Bion, who discovered by accident that groups produce leaders as much as leaders produce groups.

Kurt Lewin, whose work shows that the climate you set is mostly the one you create without meaning to.

Albert Bandura, on why belief is built by doing rather than by being told.

Edwin Locke, on goals (the most replicated finding in the field, and the most reliably misapplied).

Bernard Bass, on transformational leadership, and why the version you have been sold is not the one the research supports.

Amy Edmondson, on the price of silence, and why staying quiet is usually the rational choice.

Elliott Jaques, on time horizon as the thing that actually separates levels of work.

Robert Hogan, on how good leaders derail (not by lacking skills, but by overusing the strengths that got them promoted).

Every chapter ends with a section on where the evidence runs out. Which findings replicate, which have failed to, and which lenses are worth holding up rather than instructions worth following. A book about scientific findings should be honest about their limits, and most are not.

Drawn from the author's academic research and experience as an executive and operator himself, every chapter is written to be usable this week.

For the first-time manager working out what the job consists of. The executive wondering why the strategy keeps arriving somewhere other than where it was sent. The founder whose company has outgrown the way it was built. The board member choosing who runs it next.

It will not tell you what to do on Thursday morning. It will tell you which of your instincts are probably wrong, where to look first when something is not working, and which pieces of received wisdom you can stop repeating.

A more modest promise than most books in this category make. And a considerably more useful one.

From the author of "Negotiation Hacks - Expert Tactics To Get What You Want" (hacks used by over 1 million people and counting).