Leader, Lead Thyself : ON LEADERSHIP <i> by John W. Gardner (The Free Press/Macmillan: $19.95; 220 pp.; 0-02-911311-3) </i>

Many people sneer unfairly at books about leadership. “Did De Gaulle need one?” they ask. “Did Churchill?” No, although each did write one while languishing in the political wilderness before World War II.

John Gardner, languishing at Stanford after long service in government and business and as founding chairman of the citizens’ lobby, Common Cause, has written one as well, and sneer I must. Chatty in places but in large part barely readable, as heavily laden with quotations as a George Will column (“Moliere said, ‘Where the goat is tethered, there it must browse’ ”), “On Leadership” blazes a path to nowhere.

The reader comes away from De Gaulle’s “Edge of the Sword” or Churchill’s “Great Contemporaries” moved and inspired, at least to read more and perhaps even to achieve more. From “On Leadership,” the reader gets writer’s cramp from grinding his pencil under such epigrams as: “The historical moment is the broadest context affecting the emergence and functioning of leaders; but immensely diverse settings of a more modest nature clearly affect leadership.” Another bell-ringer, printed in italics so the reader will not miss it, is: “Leaders unwilling to seek mutually workable arrangements with systems external to their own are not serving the long-term interests of their constituents.”

Gardner evidently gets around the country a lot, gathering anecdotes that comprise the one colorful aspect of an otherwise gray text. For instance, he recalls comparing a new organization he once visited with “eight small boys chasing a chipmunk: . . . a lot of wasted energy--but great flexibility and unlimited motivation!” But these nuggets are almost completely smothered in a sociological stew composed of gristly terms of art and doughy chapter and section headings such as “The Knitting Together” and “The Multilevel Dialogue.”

To find the extraneous cooks, one probably need look no further than the acknowledgements, where Gardner mentions a daunting number of benefactors of his research, alludes ominously to a “five-year study,” and then thanks four people (the villains at last?) “who wrote the series of leadership papers that precede the book.” It would have been better if he had filed the leadership papers and just done an avuncular 2,500-worder for The Reader’s Digest based on his broad personal and professional experience, ordered and mailed 10,000 reprints, and been done with it.

Instead Gardner swings wildly between specific managerial suggestions, such as that organizations should rotate personnel more, and wondrously above-the-fray prescriptions for our faltering society. He advises: “Every union, church, club and professional firm should make provision for the growth of its members.” Shout it from the rooftops! He avows: “What is needed is an attitude, widely shared throughout the society, toward individual growth, through development and learning in the context of our shared values--an attitude that sees learning as lifelong, that never ceases to seek out the undiscovered possibilities in each of us.” You bet that’s what we need, and we’re lucky that someone’s finally had the guts to say it.

Indeed, the book contains more big-hearted resolutions than the Boy Scout Handbook. Our leaders need to communicate more. Special-interest groups need to become less selfish. Our communities need to cohere more. We need to hew to our traditional values more, so long as they do not make us rigid and narrow instead of flexible and pluralistic. Our middle-managers need to be delegated more chances to use their energy and creativity. Young people need to be shown how the full potential within themselves can be unleashed so that they can be the leaders of tomorrow.

At times, Gardner’s feet seem simply to leave the ground. At one point, in warning against the aging of “human systems”--the Roman Empire, vast multinational corporations, that kind of thing--he suggests that when values have been “encrusted with hypocrisy, corroded by cynicism or simply abandoned,” we must “generate new values. . . .” But what does that actually mean? How at this late date are we going to concoct “new values”? Talk about your mad social scientist! The suggestion seems especially discontinuous since a few pages earlier Gardner had asserted that demagogues such as Hitler feed on the disintegration of a community’s traditional values, which suggests we ought to hang on for dear life to the values we’ve already got.

In the end, where there should have been no book, there appears to be two. Besides Gardner’s praiseworthy but Pollyanna-ish homilies about building a better society, “On Leadership” also replows more prosaic ground already well covered by corporate leadership gurus such as Warren Bennis. Executives and supervisors might find an idea or two here that would help them run their shops better. Gardner also puts in a welcome plug for a solid liberal-arts education at a time when our young people are increasingly expected to become specialized technocrats by the time they are 17.

Otherwise, the book is mainly valuable as a concrete exercise in time-management theory. According to one of the seven endorsements on the back cover, this is a “masterpiece” (Walter F. Ulmer Jr., president, Center for Creative Leadership, who may or may not have ever seen Renoir’s “The First Outing”).

The center is mentioned four times in the text, so Ulmer’s enthusiasm is understandable. But should a savvy executive really take time out from planning for the survival of our Western institutions in the next century to read a book called “On Leadership”? Or, ever mindful of the need to delegate, should he send it to an aide with a brisk order written on the cover letter: “Gardner a key guy. Look at book, do blurb, my sig. I don’t need to see”?