Resonant Leadership: Renewing Yourself and Connecting with Others Through Mindfulness, Hope, and Compassion 
The authors, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee, will be familiar to many businesspeople and management theorists. They collaborated with Daniel Goleman on the bestselling Primal Leadership, which extended Goleman's seminal work on emotional intelligence, and explained how "EQ", not just IQ, underpins success in guiding and directing organizations. With this latest book, Boyatzis and McKee have continued developing their holistic view of management. It's an attractive one. Resonant Leadership begins with recognition of leaders' essential humanity and analyzes the physical, mental, and emotional triggers that make men and women strong or weak as leaders. As readers might expect from an HBS Press offering, Boyatzis and McKee's methodology is appropriately academic, with extensive footnotes and research citations, but it also uses a nice blend of anecdotes from their field work as consultants, and is expressed through decidedly touchy-feely language. What emerges is a highly engaging, readable work that takes business audiences into somewhat unusual psychological territory, far beyond the usual bar charts and spreadsheets.
The book's organization is simple. Boyatzis and McKee start by describing the highly stressful conditions in which leaders operate today, and explain sympathetically how many well-intentioned people fall into what they call "dissonance" due to burnout. Whereas the authors' earlier book focused on the initial ingredients for leadership effectiveness, their interest now is in ongoing, enduring resonance--leaders who can be effective today, but also maintain their edge into tomorrow, as well. Resonant Leadership thus moves from this initial exposition of problems--management ineffectiveness, and/or burnout--to solutions. The authors anchor their prescription around three core qualities which they believe resonant leaders must continually cultivate: mindfulness, hope, and compassion. These may sound like ephemeral concepts, but they form the touchstone of Resonant Leadership and are cited again and again. Readers of Boyatzis and McKee's latest--whether already-strong leaders looking to maintain their effectiveness, or burned-out ones aiming to get back in the proverbial saddle--will find this is a thought-provoking read. --Peter Han
Reviews
Furthermore, I applaud the authors for having the courage to tackle the very important subject of burnout -- there are more leaders suffering from burnout than one would think. I have simply been amazed at how many burned out executives I have met in my time, and how few of them seemed to realize that they were burned out. Plus, the simple and effective perspectives of attending to Mindfulness, Hope and Compassion are very important indicators for workplace success.
While "Resonant Leadership" is an important book for leaders, the one criticism that I have of it is that it is a little light on practical application. For a book that holds a bit more practical applications for leaders, I would highly recommend "Leading People the Black Belt Way" from expert Tim Warneka -- a book that covers similiar territory in a similar "applied academics" fashion, but has the added benefit of offering a few more specific, hands on approaches for developing Mindfulness, Hope & Compassion.
Overall, I would highly recommend "Resonant Leadership".