What is leadership? What are the secrets of the phenomenon by which one person can lead millions – sometimes to salvation, sometimes to destruction? Is leadership innate, or can it be learned? Above all, are there any techniques to leadership that can be applied whatever the message the leader wants to convey?
By choosing Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill, two totally opposite leaders – both in what they stood for and in the way in which they seemed to lead – award-winning historian Andrew Roberts examines the phenomenon of political and military leadership, and comes to some fascinating and provoking conclusions.
With an Introduction and Conclusion that draws fascinating parallels with leaders from other eras, and by incisively examining those aspects of leadership that Hitler and Churchill had in common, Roberts comes to a series of conclusions about the practice of leadership that are as relevant today as they were before and during the Second World War. He also looks at the way Hitler and Churchill estimated each other as leaders, and how it affected the outcome of the conflict.
This groundbreaking book accompanies Roberts’s BBC landmark history series for 2003, Secrets of Leadership, and – in a world that is as dependent on leadership as any earlier age – it asks searching questions about our need to be led. In doing so, Roberts forces us to re-examine the way that we look at those who take decisions for us.