114 Academy of Management Learning & Education
precedes many more, and that some are equally use-
ful in my classroom.
REFERENCES
Bell, A., Medjuck, J., Pritzker, G. (Producers), & Reitman, I.
(Director, Producer). 2014. Draft Day [Motion Picture].
United States: Summit Entertainment.
Boyle, D., Colson, C., Graf, R. (Producers), Dayton, J., &
Valerie Faris, V. (Directors). 2017. Battle of the Sexes
[Motion Picture]. United Kingdom & United States:
Fox Searchlight Pictures.
Brooks, J. L., Mark, L., Sakai, R. (Producers), &
Crowe, C. (Director, Producer). 1996. Jerry Maguire
[Motion Picture]. United States: Tristar Pictures.
Cantillon, E., Scott, G., Scott, R., Shuman, L., Wolthoff, D.
(Producers), & Landesman, P. (Director). 2015. Con-
cussion [Motion Picture]. United Kingdom, Australia,
& United States: Columbia Pictures, LStar Capital, &
Village Roadshow Pictures.
Chartoff, R., Winkler, I. (Producers), & Avildsen, J. G. (Di-
rector). 1976. Rocky [Motion Picture]. United States:
Chartoff-Winkler Productions.
Ciardi, M., Gray, G., Roth, J. (Producers), & Gillespie, C.
(Director). 2014. Million Dollar Arm [Motion Picture].
United States: Walt Disney Pictures.
Daniels, D. B. 2005. You throw like a girl: Sport and mi-
sogyny on the silver screen. Film & History, 35: 29–38.
DeHaven, C., Pizzo, A. (Producers), & Anspaugh, D.
(Director). 1986. Hoosiers (aka Best Shot) [Motion
Picture]. United Kingdom & United States: De Haven
Productions, Hendale, & MGM.
De Luca, M., Horovitz, R., Pitt, B. (Producers), &
Miller, B. (Director). 2011. Moneyball [Motion Picture].
United States: Sony Picture Studios.
Gale, D., Robbins, B., Tollin, M. (Producers), & Carter, T.
(Director). 2005. Coach Carter [Motion Picture].
United States: MTV Films.
Grazer, B. (Producer), & Berg, P. (Director). 2004. Friday
Night Lights [Motion Picture]. United States: Univer-
sal Pictures.
Halsted, D., Donner, L. S., Townsend, C. (Producers), &
Stone, O. (Director). 1999. Any Given Sunday [Motion
Picture]. United States: Warner Brothers.
Jansen, S. C., & Sabo, D. 1994. The sport/war metaphor:
Hegemonic masculinity, the Persian Gulf War, and
the new world order. Sociology of Sport Journal, 11:
1–17.
Martland, H. S. 1928. Punch drunk. Journal of the Amer-
ican Medical Association, 91: 1103–1107.
Omalu, B. I., DeKosky, S. T., Minster, R. L., Kamboh,
M. I., Hamilton, R. L., & Wecht, C. H. 2005.
March
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy in a National
Football League player. Neurosurgery, 57: 128–133.
Puttnam, D. (Producer), & Hudson, H. (Director). 1981.
Chariots of Fire [Motion Picture]. United Kingdom:
Twentieth Century Fox.
Steel, D. (Producer), & Turteltaub, J. (Director). 1993. Cool
Runnings [Motion Picture]. United States: Walt Dis-
ney Pictures.
Taylor, B. 2017. Why sports are a terrible metaphor for
business. Harvard Business Review. Downloaded
from https://hbr.org/2017/02/why-sports-are-a-terrible-
metaphor-for-business
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Leadership Lessons From
Sports, by Harvard Business Review. Boston, MA:
Harvard Business Review Press, 2018.
Reviewed by Jon Billsberry, Deakin University
(j.billsberry@deakin.edu.au).
From the moment I saw this book, it intrigued me. I
teach leadership to postgraduate sport management
students, and I am always on the lookout for engaging
cases to base discussions upon. In addition, I must
admit that I was also curious about how this “airport
book” might integrate into academic study. Like
many professors, I suffer the frustration that many
students are reluctant to read widely on their subject
and wondered if the accessible style, context-
relevance, and stories from the famous people in-
cluded in the book might improve their engagement.
Viewed through my academic’s eyes, I found my-
self a little baffled by this book from the moment I
picked it up. HBR’s 10 Must Reads? There are already
23 books in the series. This one contains 13 sections
and 16 articles, all of which have been previously
published in Harvard Business Review (HBR) or
on their online platform. There is no introductory
chapter, nor any explanation about how, or by
whom, the articles were pulled together; this is a
vanilla collection of 16 articles previously published
in HBR (very) broadly on the theme of leadership
and sport. However, once I started reading, my ini-
tial skepticism was assuaged, and my impressions
of the book were not totally negative.
As you would expect from material already pub-
lished in HBR, the articles are very well written. They
are clear and fluent and have been beautifully edited.
The 140 pages or so of content were very easy to digest.
This fluency is helped by the minimal (virtually non-
existent) referencing, famous and informed writers
and interviewees discussing interesting topics, and
the short, punchy length of most chapters. I whizzed
2019 Book & Resource Reviews
through the book in a couple of short sessions, and I’d be
lying if I said that I didn’t enjoy much of the content. The
famous interviewees include Sir Alex Ferguson, Andre
Agassi, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Mikhail Baryshnikov,
Greg Louganis, and Joe Girardi, and famous writers in-
clude Bill Parcells and Adrian Moorhouse. By anyone’s
standards, these are elite sports people. Sadly, they are
all men and, all bar one, White. The only women in-
volved in this project appear to be some of the in-
terviewers and Melanie Whelan, the CEO of Soulcycle,
an organization running indoor cycling gyms, who
writes a short article that reads like an advertising bro-
chure for her firm, which feels shoehorned into the
book.
As I progressed, the phrase that stuck in my mind
was “Cult of Personality,” as the interviews in this
book are extraordinarily uncritical, and the inter-
viewers are awestruck hero worshippers (quite
understandably perhaps). The general tendency in
the articles is to put the interviewees on a pedestal
and give them space to pontificate on why they are
so great. Throughout, leadership is perceived as a
leader-centric phenomenon: These people did great
things because they are great people. This approach
grated on me because I teach leadership from a so-
cially constructed perspective where leadership is a
quality of perception (Billsberry, Mueller, Skinner,
Swanson, Corbett, & Ferkins, 2018; Fairhurst &
Grant, 2010; Grint, 1997, 2000, 2005; Meindl,
1995). People are leaders if other people think they
are, not because they possess some particular com-
bination of factors that make them leaders. In my
eyes, Sir Alex Ferguson is a great leader. I think this
because I have observed and heard about him doing
things that align with my implicit leadership theory
(ILT: Epitropaki, Sy, Martin, Tram-Quon, & Topakas,
2013; Offermann & Coats, 2017; Tavares, Sobral,
Goldszmidt, & Araújo, 2018). Greg Louganis, on the
other hand, did great things, but, in my view, not
things that make him a leader. Everyone has different
ILTs, different experiences, and different percep-
tions. Hence, everyone has different views on whom
they regard as a leader and whom they don’t. This
observer- or follower-driven perspective on leader-
ship is completely absent from the book, and instead,
there is an automatic acceptance of all the inter-
viewees are leaders. It is a given: These are great
leaders talking about the great things they achieved,
and the underlying message of the book is that peo-
ple can become leaders if they mimic and do what
the great leaders say in these pages.
Another quality of the book that grated on me
was the declarative tone of most articles. The
115
interviewees are good at telling the readers what they
should do (e.g., “devote yourself passionately to self-
improvement” or “make it clear from day one that
you’re in charge”), or what skills they should master
(e.g., “never stop adapting” and “match the message
to the moment”), but very poor at explaining why
they are important or how these changes might be
accomplished. When practical advice is offered, it
tends to be trite (e.g., “Q: And maybe suggest that
they perform a little ritual before they open their
email inbox or something. A: It definitely can’t hurt.”
Although I assume this exchange was a joke, it suc-
cinctly captures the platitudinous tone of the book).
This declarative voice coupled with the absence of
any evidence demonstrating that the interviewees’
comments are relevant to other people means that
readers must take on trust what these people are
saying and work out for themselves how to make
these changes.
These problems came to a head for me when I read
the article by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, entitled
“The Making of a Corporate Athlete.” Here, the au-
thors liken executives to athletes in terms of the
physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual demands
placed on them. As such, there are lessons from
athletes about preparation, sleep, diet, recovery, and
developing physical strength and stamina that made
a lot of sense to me. I found myself thinking that this
paper would provide the framework of an interesting
leadership unit. Once I completed reading the arti-
cle, I found myself wondering why I liked the article
so much, and realized that it was because it mirrored
my own thoughts about leadership. I hadn’t been
persuaded by any evidence or convinced by any
argument; it just made a lot of sense to me and rein-
forced what I already thought. And that’s the prob-
lem with many of the articles in this collection:
When they work, confirmation bias kicks in, they
reinforce what you already believe, and these beliefs
are given weight by the backing of an iconic achiever.
Several articles have a slightly different tone, and
the interviews work better when the interviewees are
encouraged to reflect on the challenges and criti-
cisms they have tried to overcome. For example,
Greg Louganis talks about having to hide his HIV-
positive status so he could compete, and Kareem
Abdul-Jabbar briefly reflects on his experience fac-
ing racism and his public persona of being a difficult
person. But sadly, these moments of insightful self-
reflection are rare and short.
In the final chapter in the book, “Why Sports Are a
Terrible Metaphor for Business,” Bill Taylor gives
three reasons why the sporting metaphor doesn’t
116 Academy of Management Learning & Education
work for business: (1) The nature of competition is
different, (2) the nature of teamwork and cooperation
is different, and (3) the nature of ownership is dif-
ferent. These are interesting points, but their impact
on the reader is very negative in terms of the book’s
reception. It is like saying “everything you have read
in the book up to this point is worthless.” Sadly, it
leaves a bitter taste in the mouth and the sense that
your time has been wasted.
My immediate reaction was to toss it in the bin. Yes, I
had enjoyed reading the book, but ultimately, this book
is little more than a collection of fairy tales about heroes
achieving great things. Heroes who have returned from
the conflict and regale us with tales of daring-do; ripping
yarns of bravery, bravado, and brilliance. These are
modern fairy tales retold through the hero’s eyes with
their cunning, courage, and valor superseding other
influences. Such tales can provide momentary in-
spiration, but their relevance disintegrates with any se-
rious analysis. Each hero inhabited a unique situation
with a particular and nonreplicable set of circum-
stances. Moreover, as these interviews and accounts
allow the sport heroes to tell us the reasons why they
think they were successful, we immediately run into
self-serving bias, in which people tend to attribute the
reasons for their success to their own skills and abilities,
often ignoring other relevant factors. Even more funda-
mentally, the people included in this book achieved so
much, their exploits seem beyond the ken of normal
humans. Who can realistically aspire to emulate them?
But for all that, there are some lessons for man-
agement educators. One thing this book does ex-
ceptionally well is connect with the reader, or rather,
it connected well with me, a White male sport fan
who remembered most of the events the people in
the book reflected upon. The combination of the
topics, authors, and interviewees drew me in, and
they had my undivided attention. I was receptive.
From my perspective, it was unfortunate that the
uncritical and declarative tone of the writing then
alienated me, but that’s not the point: The subject
was alluring and I was attentive. As I reflected on this
insight, it highlighted the way I introduce topics to
my students and stressed the importance of telling
interesting and engaging stories to illustrate, explain,
and apply theory. Stories can capture people’s atten-
tion, foster engagement, and make learning memora-
ble. But the takeaway from this book is that the lesson
has to be more than the story. The stories must serve
the learning objectives and be used to amplify the
desired outcomes. This book is a collection of short,
snappy, and entertaining stories desperately in need
of theoretical application.
March
Ironically, the uncritical nature of these engaging
stories is what makes them useful. As such, they serve as
texts upon which students can practice their critical
skills. In an age of fake news, the worship of celebrities,
and the death of objective truth, critically analyzing
these articles would help students appreciate the
structure and strength of arguments, the importance of
contextual factors, issues of validity, perspective, and
utility, and help them become informed consumers of
information who can see through the rhetorical spin of
people of whom we might otherwise be in awe. These
chapters can start discussion and analysis in the lead-
ership and management classrooms, but the male-
centered nature of their content will certainly prevent
its widespread adoption. Alternatively, of course, this
book is simply an enjoyable read for people with a
general interest in (male) sport and leadership who need
to while away a few hours waiting for their next flight.
REFERENCES
Billsberry, J., Mueller, J., Skinner, J., Swanson, S., Corbett,
B., & Ferkins, L. 2018. Reimagining leadership in
sport management: Lessons from the social con-
struction of leadership. Journal of Sport Management,
32: 170–182.
Epitropaki, O., Sy, T., Martin, R., Tram-Quon, S., &
Topakas, A. 2013. Implicit leadership and fol-
lowership theories “in the wild”: Taking stock of
information-processing approaches to leadership and
followership in organizational settings. The Leader-
ship Quarterly, 24: 858–881.
Fairhurst, G. T., & Grant, D. 2010. The social construction
of leadership: A sailing guide. Management Com-
munication Quarterly, 24: 171–210.
Grint, K. 1997. Reading Tolstoy’s wave. In K. Grint (Ed.),
Leadership: Classical, contemporary, and critical ap-
proaches: 1–26. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Grint, K. 2000. The arts of leadership. Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press.
Grint, K. 2005. Leadership: Limits and possibilities.
Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave.
Meindl, J. R. 1995. The romance of leadership as a follower-
centric theory: A social constructionist approach.
The Leadership Quarterly, 6: 329–341.
Offermann, L. R., & Coats, M. R. 2017. Implicit theories of
leadership: Stability and change over two decades.
The Leadership Quarterly, (July): 1–10. Downloaded
from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2017.12.003
Tavares, G. M., Sobral, F., Goldszmidt, R., & Araújo, F.
2018. Opening the implicit leadership theories’ black
box: An experimental approach with conjoint analy-
sis. Frontiers in Psychology, 9: 1–11.