Robert K. Greenleaf: A Life of Servant Leadership

Meet the man whose work influenced some of the world’s most prominent business leaders and spawned a worldwide movement that is still gaining strength today. Robert Greenleaf’s landmark 1970 essay, The Servant as Leader, introduced the now common term “servant leadership” to the world. His work has been cited by leading writers and business people including Ken Blanchard, Stephen Covey, Peter Senge, Margaret Wheatley, and Peter Block and led to the development of Centers for Servant Leadership around the world.

This long-awaited biography of Robert Greenleaf, authorized by his surviving children, finally tells his story. Drawn from Greenleaf’s personal papers, correspondence, and interviews with family and friends, it provides a fascinating look at the sources of Greenleaf’s thought, his friendships with some of the most influential men and women of the twentieth century—including Eleanor Roosevelt, Peter Drucker, the Menninger brothers, Reinhold Niebuhr, Aldous Huxley, Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson, and many others—and how he influenced business history well before his first book was published at the age of seventy-three.

At a time when leadership and management fads substitute as wisdom, Robert Greenleaf’s life stories provide clues for how each person can make a difference in the workplace, no matter what position he or she holds.