Alcock 1 Emilie Alcock Professor Christopher Stewart LIS 770 20 June 2012 Read & Respond 4 Fitsimmons, Gary.

Library Leadership. The Bottom Line: Managing Library Finances 20.4 (2007): 172173. Web. 19 June 2012. SUMMARY This article is the introduction of a multi-article series on various aspects of library leadership in The Bottom Line, which spans several years. Fitsimmons begins with an attempt to define leadership, in which he quotes Chester A. Schriesheim who says, [F]ew guidelines exist which are of use to a practitioner although over 3,000 leadership studies have been conducted over the course of 70 years (Fitsimmons 172). Next the author discusses the clich of the manager versus the leader taken from Warren Bennis: Leaders are people who do the right thing; managers are people who do things right. Fitsimmons argues that this dichotomy is artificial, because library administrators must do the right thing the right way (Fitsimmons 172). The main argument that the author makes is that because good management must be consistent, it also must be static, while good leadership must be dynamic. ANALYSIS I find Fitsimmonss argument about consistency in a good manager to be interesting, because Drucker writes, Effective leadership . . . is based on being consistent (Drucker 271). I believe that the discrepancy between these two authors is a case of semantics.

Alcock 2 Fitsimmons uses the word dynamic to describe a good leader, and that word is synonymous with active, self-motivated, and vigorous, some of the qualities that Drucker values. Indeed, Drucker writes of the many activities on which effective leaders should expect to work[T]hinking through the organizations mission, defining it, and establishing it . . . The leader sets the goals, sets the priorities, and sets and maintains the standards (Drucker 270). Drucker is telling his readers that good leaders have goals, despite the constraints of reality (270). Perhaps to use both authors terminology, an effective leader must be consistently dynamic. Although Fitsimmons and Drucker use conflicting terminology to describe effective leadership, they still agree on the heart of the matter. Stueart and Moran also support the idea of the dynamic leader . . . the successful organization is almost always set apart from less successful ones by the fact that it is headed by a dynamic and effective leader (323). Both Fitsimmons and Stueart and Moran discuss the relationship between and leader and his/her followers, agreeing that Good leadership has the tendency to beget good followership (Fitsimmons 173) and A leader is not a leader without his followers (Stueart and Moran 325). All of these authors make clear that leadership and management are different issues, and while the word dynamic as a descriptor of effective leaders does not suit all of them, each makes clear in his or her own way desirable traits of good leaders.

Alcock 3 Works Cited Drucker, Peter F. The Essential Drucker: Selections from the Management Works of Peter F. Drucker. New York: HarperBusiness, 2001. Print. Stueart, Robert D, and Barbara B Moran. Library and Information Center Management. Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited, 2007. Print.