A Leader's Destiny

Why Psychology, Personality, and Character Make All the Difference

By: Elias Aboujaoude

Narrated by: Pej Vahdat

A psychiatrist puts leadership “on the couch,” with a provocative exploration of its crucial, often ignored, psychological and personal character foundations.

Elias Aboujaoude’s distinctive exploration of leadership provides unusual insight into understanding who should and should not be striving for leadership positions.

Dr. Aboujaoude takes on the culture at large, explaining how our cult-like obsession with leadership gives narcissists an edge and results in leadership failure everywhere we look—and how resisting the imperative to rise at all costs can leave many with an inferiority complex.

His takedown of the “leadership industrial complex,” an unholy alliance of gurus, coaches, business school professors, and TED-talkers, from Harvard on down, pokes a very sharp elbow into an industry seemingly united in a modern form of alchemy to create leadership gold—a waste of time, money, and effort, since leadership cannot be taught through books or coaching and cannot be bought.

Rather, Dr. Aboujaoude vividly illustrates, leaders emerge from a unique combination of personal, psychological, and situational factors that may not be easily controlled. To a large degree, great leaders are born, or happen, with the help of innate temperament, talent, opportunity, circumstances, and timing.

Frank and unflinching, this refreshing take on a classic subject, with its focus on the art of knowing yourself, provides new insight into whether your psychology is aligned with the requirements of effective and happy leadership. The effect is to empower listeners to understand themselves and step up if they have what it takes to lead—or find equally rewarding, often superior, ways to achieve fulfillment and leave their mark if they don’t.

©2024 Elias Aboujaoude (P)2024 PublicAffairs

Critic reviews

“[Aboujaoude] delivers a book that anyone considering enrollment in a course with “leadership” in the title should investigate. A distinctive, thought-provoking view on leadership in the 21st century.”—Kirkus Reviews

“[A] provocative takedown…Aboujaoude makes a thought-provoking case that pat, multistep prescriptions for good leadership generalize too broadly and fail to account for the importance of chance…will leave readers with much to contemplate.”—Publishers Weekly

“Elias Aboujaoude’s thoughtful and stimulating A Leader’s Destiny is at once a great read and an incisive analysis of what we mean by ‘leadership’. By unpacking the essential personality and psychological qualities needed for ascending to leadership positions and the individual and societal price that one—or all of us—may need to pay for getting there, Aboujaoude uses his great experience in psychology and psychiatry for critical insight into how our own makeups generate behaviors with positive and potentially negative consequences.”—Alan F. Schatzberg, MD, Past President, American Psychiatric Association.