Todd Pittinsky
Leaders who lust can and often do have an enduring impact. Professor Todd L. Pittinsky, Department of Technology and Society, explores six types of lust in his latest book, Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy (Cambridge University Press), with Harvard Political Scientist Barbara Kellerman.
Each of the core chapters focuses on different lusts and features characters that bring lust to life. The book describes the following six types of lust with which leaders are linked:
- Power: the ceaseless craving to control.
- Money: the limitless desire to accrue great wealth.
- Sex: the constant hunt for sexual gratification.
- Success: the unstoppable need to achieve.
- Legitimacy: the tireless claim to identity and equity.
- Legacy: the endless quest to leave a permanent imprint.
In this path-breaking book, one of the most perceptive and prolific scholars in leadership, Barbara Kellerman, teams up with one of the most talented and promising social scientists, Todd Pittinsky, to pierce an important veil. Instead of telling us what leaders should be like, we learn how they truly are. This is an eye-opening must read.” — David Gergen, White House Adviser to four U.S. Presidents and Founding Director of the Center for Public Leadership, Harvard Kennedy School
Pittinsky’s other books include Science, Technology, and Society, Us Plus Them, Restoring Trust, Crossing the Divide, Working Fathers, and a forthcoming title, The Caregiving Ambition.
