The Military Leadership Handbook.

J.L. Granatstein is a history professor at York University and author of
War and Peacekeeping and For Better or For Worse.

Formed several years ago, the Canadian Defence Academy is responsible for the continuing education of the Canadian Forces. One of its projects, run out of the Canadian Forces Leadership Institute at the Royal Military College, is the Strategic Leadership Writing Project, and this handbook is its latest published study. With 39 chapters, each focusing on a single leadership trait, concept, idea, or challenge such as trust, ideology, morale, and ethics, this volume naturally required a broad range of authors. The result is perhaps too much jargon from too many disciplines, but the book will end up on every officer’s bookshelf, to be pulled down for citation in papers and memoranda. Whether it makes leadership more comprehensible, however, is another question. The intangibles that make soldiers follow one officer anywhere and refuse to follow another may not be so readily quantified. Still, leadership merits study, and it is long past time for the Canadian Forces do so.