NONFICTION - June 28, 1992

LEADERSHIP JAZZ by Max DePree (Currency Doubleday: $20; 228 pp.). While business self-help books serve a useful function as modern-day moms and dads, offering readers encouragement to boost the self-esteem that corporate culture can undermine, the actual advice they proffer is often so self-evident that you want to cry for the trees whose lives they claimed. “Leadership Jazz,” in contrast, is subtle and uniquely insightful because Max DePree--chairman of the board of a successful furniture company--has an ability to look behind the macho corporate facade. Where we see soaring architecture and banzai shareholder reports, he recognizes that even the biggest corporations are essentially fragile creatures.

The best leaders, DePree counsels wisely, are those who understand that this fragility stems from the need to maintain an exquisitely delicate equilibrium between the employees’ need for stability and security and the company’s need for volatility and growth. Change may require “a form of dying,” DePree writes, but any voyage worth taking carries a measure of uncertainty. The journey of Odysseus was heroic and compelling because he lacked an agenda, DePree writes; his life was “a process of becoming and never arriving.”

How can leaders help their employees weather this Homerian voyage? By drowning out the bombastic melodies of “Hail to the Chief” that might come to mind--these only encourage a kind of management that thwarts human potential and stifles criticism--and instead humming “leadership jazz,” music which everyone can play, provided they are willing to listen to one another.