Watership Down: The greatest leadership text ever? Dr Richard Claydon.

If you’ve read as many leadership books as I have, you might well have reached the same conclusion. Very few of them are any good.

Some give you leadership models that don’t seem to be very accurate.

Others tell you leadership stories that don’t connect to your situational context. A third throws the kitchen sink of leadership at you, resulting in overwhelming headaches.

And they all reference the same bloody examples. If I have to read about Southwest Airlines once more, I swear I’ll…

Long ago, I turned to non-leadership texts to find inspiration. Some are histories. Others are scientific investigations. But I also read plays and novels.

One of the best of these is a tale about rabbits going on a long journey to find a new warren. The adventures of Hazel, Fiver, Bigwig, Blackberry, Dandelion, Pipkin and their ragtag band of wandering bunnies provides insights into all manner of effective leadership written in an accessible and enjoyable way.

In this Dialogic Drinks, we’ll look at:

• Fiver’s capacity to intuitively sense-make emergent patterns, while his meek demeanour and incapacity to articulate them ensures he’s unseen and unheard by power
• Hazel’s ability to enable each rabbit, and other animals and birds, to blossom and bloom into affective and trustworthy team members
• Bigwig’s development from hotheadedness to cool decision-making under-pressure in the the totalitarian conditions of the Efrafa Warren

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Dr Richard Claydon is the co-founder of EQ Lab, and the designer of the Future of Leadership module at Macquarie Business School’s Global MBA Program (ranked #6 globally by CEO Magazine).

He was awarded the highest achievable marks for a Ph.D in behavioural science. A Harvard Top-200 Management expert and business columnists for the Guardian newspaper have described this research as “a touchstone for the future work in management and organisation”, “outstanding in daring imagination” and “at the forefront of modern discussion and debate.”

Richard is a tier one tennis player, have coached tennis professionally, and also designed the tactics creator for the multi award-winning and world-leading management simulation, Football Manager.