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Leadership Brand: Developing Customer-Focused Leaders to Drive Performance and Building Lasting Value.

Article Excerpt
Leadership Brand: Developing Customer-Focused Leaders to Drive Performance and Building Lasting Value

Authors: Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood

Publisher: Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Massachusetts ISBN: 1-4221-1030-0 (paperback, advance reader's copy)

Leadership Brand focuses the reader on the issue of leadership development that can elevate an organization's market value and create competitive advantage. Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood argue that leadership brand represents an intangible value and shared identity among organizational leaders, which differentiates what an organization can do compared to the competition. The authors' approach to leadership brand demonstrates how to create value for investors, customers, and employees and create a competitive edge for the organization. The authors suggest that to achieve this competitive edge requires a shift from a focus on leaders to leadership: a shift from focusing on "celebrity leaders" to leadership, which represents the array of organizational leaders' credibility, capabilities, and the capacity to foster and sustain future leaders. In addition, a key component in leadership brand is to connect leaders inside the organization to investors and customers outside the firm. Leadership brand occurs when the knowledge, skills, and values of organizational leaders focus employee behavior on factors the customer cares about. Overall, leadership brand shifts the attention to what occurs inside the firm to how it links to what happens outside the firm.

The premise regarding leadership brand is that an exceptional leader may deliver exceptional results for some period of time, but quality leadership is what maintains results, allows organizations to align with changing strategies, and builds confidence in employees, customers, and investors. As such, leadership needs to expand beyond individual development to an institutional process that creates the capacity to produce future leaders to deliver future results. The authors define leadership brand as follows: "leadership brand is the identity of the leaders throughout an...

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