Book review: Sounding the Depths of Leadership: Seven Character Development Voyages To Foster Authentic Leadership in the Ongoing Present

Abstract

Donna Ladkin (2008) offers the notion of leading beautifully as a kind of inward knowing focussed on the quality of being. Sounding the Depths of Leadership attempts to lay out a process to cultivate this form of leadership experience and self-mastery process. Sewchurran pursues a leadership learning approach to cultivate a reflexive, internal search for self-mastery. He organises the approach using seven navigation charts to guide practical processes of exploring personal development and selfmastery possibilities. He draws on his decade long experience of working as an executive coach whilst also being the Director of an Executive MBA program at the Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town, South Africa. He inter-weaves these insights with contemporary leadership scholarship and philosophy to uncover the being dimension of leading in the ongoing present. To develop this inward sense of knowing he draws on a range of philosophers. The works of Aristotle, Martin Heidegger, John Dewey, John Shotter and Haridimos Tsoukas are channelled to design the explorations each chart offers. The rich, and at times dense, philosophical discussions are interwoven with stories of leadership learning which trace the journeys of several characters. The book distinguishes between an understanding of Being, spelt with a capital B, from the actual lived experience of being, spelt with a smaller b. This distinction is equated to the difference between a map and the actual experience of the territory. Seven navigation charts are built to offer an understanding of Being that stimulates changes to the experience of being.