A Leader's Destiny

Elias Aboujaoude's distinctive exploration of leadership provides unusual insight into understanding who should and should not be striving for leadership positions.

Dr Aboujaoude takes on the culture at large, explaining how our cult-like obsession with leadership gives narcissists an edge and results in leadership failure everywhere we look-and how resisting the imperative to rise at all costs can leave many with an inferiority complex.

His takedown of the "leadership industrial complex," an unholy alliance of gurus, coaches, business school professors, and TED-talkers, from Harvard on down, pokes a very sharp elbow into an industry seemingly united in a modern form of alchemy to create leadership gold-a waste of time, money, and effort, since leadership cannot be taught through books or coaching and cannot be bought.

Rather, Dr Aboujaoude vividly illustrates, leaders emerge from a unique combination of personal, psychological, and situational factors that may not be easily controlled. To a large degree, great leaders are born, or happen, with the help of innate temperament, talent, opportunity, circumstances, and timing.

Frank and unflinching, this refreshing take on a classic subject, with its focus on the art of knowing yourself, provides new insight into whether your psychology is aligned with the requirements of effective and happy leadership. The effect is to empower readers to understand themselves and step up if they have what it takes to lead-or find equally, often superior, ways to achieve fulfilment and leave their mark if they don't.

"Elias Aboujaoude's lively, accessible, and learned critique of the concept and practice of leadership raises interesting and provocative questions that resonate. Can leadership be taught? What is the role and virtue of executive coaching? How can the tools of the psychologist assist in improving current practice? What is the priority given to emotional intelligence in the training of potential leaders? Aboujaoude's case studies illuminate all these issues, and many others beyond."--Colin B. Bailey Director, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York
"Elias Aboujaoude's thoughtful and stimulating A Leader's Destiny is at once a great read and an incisive analysis of what we mean by 'leadership'. By unpacking the essential personality and psychological qualities needed for ascending to leadership positions and the individual and societal price that one--or all of us--may need to pay for getting there, Aboujaoude uses his great experience in psychology and psychiatry for critical insight into how our own makeups generate behaviors with positive and potentially negative consequences."--Alan F. Schatzberg, MD, Past President, American Psychiatric Association.
"Stanford expert Elias Aboujaoude is the perfect person to dissect how the leadership and life coaching industry has given us a new class of narcissistic leaders who model themselves on the master of impulse, Elon Musk. A potent antidote to the notion that anyone can be taught to be a leader, A Leader's Destiny gives us pioneering insight into the personal, psychological, and situational factors that shape effective leaders." --Jonathan Taplin, director emeritus, Annenberg Innovation Lab, University of Southern California
"Very engaging right from the beginning, A Leader's Destiny drew me in and made me read on and on. Everyone who aspires to a leadership role or, very importantly, who is responsible for choosing and developing leaders must read this book. I wish I had read it while I was developing my leadership team."--Dr. John Featherstone, dean emeritus, School of Dentistry, University of California, San Francisco
"[A] provocative takedown...Aboujaoude makes a thought-provoking case that pat, multistep prescriptions for good leadership generalize too broadly and fail to account for the importance of chance...will leave readers with much to contemplate."--Publishers Weekly
"[Aboujaoude] delivers a book that anyone considering enrollment in a course with "leadership" in the title should investigate. A distinctive, thought-provoking view on leadership in the 21st century."--Kirkus Reviews

Elias Aboujaoude, M.D. is a Stanford University professor and psychiatrist at Stanford University Medical School, researcher, internationally recognized internet scholar. He also has an appointment at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles (second-ranked hospital in US) where his work focuses on digital and internet-related psychological health, He is the author of Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the e-Personality (a New York Times Editor's Choice). In addition to Stanford and Cedars-Sinai, he has held faculty appointments at UC Berkeley and UCSF, and an Honorary Professorship at the University of York. His research and writings have been widely covered, including by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Harvard Business Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Congressional Quarterly, Wired, TIME, and Newsweek, and on National Public Radio, BBC, CNN, FOX, and CBS.

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