Lan Liu surprised me with this shared passion when he visited me in Santa Monica on a pleasant morning two years ago. He had made an appointment with me as a “leadership student” and also editor-in-chief of China’s leading management magazine. He told me that he was going to talk to Jim Collins, Jim Kouzes and James March on the same trip; he had already spoken to, among others, John Kotter, Ronald Heifetz, Peter Senge, and Bill George when he traveled to the United States last time; and he was planning to visit Howard Gardner, Noel Tichy and more later on.

I was impressed of course, more by his charm than his ambitious and exciting plan. He was fabulous at learning from conversation. I asked him in an email later, “Do all, well, not all but do most Chinese have your whimsy and humor?” I dropped a note to my co-author Noel Tichy the very day and encouraged him to talk to Liu, “Spent an hour with him this morning and found it worthwhile. I guarantee that you will find him engaging and thoughtful.”

Now with this book, which I am glad that I made a little contribution to, I find my time spent with Liu even more worthwhile as it wouldn’t be just the two of us learning from our conversation. Liu has made a unique contribution by scouting around for all those extraordinary leadership thinkers, engaging them in thoughtful conversations, getting the best ideas out of them, and presenting them in a delightfully readable format. None of the above is an easy task, but all are fulfilling ones. I have to confess a principled envy of Liu’s capacity to engage others. All leadership students, researchers, educators, or practicing managers and public servants who aspire to become a leader, should have this tome as a compulsory reading. “Dialog is the oldest and the most effective way of learning from a master,” writes Liu. He does it well.

The second major contribution of this book is the eight disciplines of leadership Liu has summarized those thinkers’ ideas into: (1) Connecting with people, (2) Learning from failure, (3) Reflecting on experience, (4) Thinking deeply, (5) Storytelling, (6) Being a teacher, (7) Knowing yourself, (8) Becoming yourself. Those disciplines —a word Liu has carefully, and rightly chosen to make the point that leadership requires daily practice and continuing hard work—aren’t novel or fancy; I have covered many of them in my book On Becoming a Leader. But as evidenced in being the constant themes those thinkers hit again and again, they are the compass directing the journey of becoming a leader.

All eight disciplines are pivotal, and can’t be addressed lightly. For example, although I already wrote a lot about “knowing yourself” and “becoming yourself,” recently I revisited this topic in “Leadership as a Performing Art,” an essay included in The Essential Bennis. In it I told a story about Sydney Pollack, the late Oscar-winning director who once told me that he was at a loss when he first moved behind the camera, so he simply acted like a director. “I even tried to dress like a director—clothes that were kind of outdoorsy,” he said. That raises crucial questions about leadership. Can a leader be authentic, or do the masks of command force the leader to be something other than his or her true self? In becoming yourself can you both act and be real? These are questions with no easy answers. The role of a leader is usually greater than the individual and thus worth taking on. Pollack made the leader’s requisite leap into the unknown and he excelled.

Liu’s third big contribution is he has opened a door to the exchange of leadership thoughts between the West and the East. Few such books, if any, have brought in thinkers from China and India and made their voice as sonorous as those from the United States and Europe. As Liu points out, leadership has been to a large extent an American product, and American scholars tend to pursue a universal leadership model.

I don’t think such a pursuit is completely futile. Just as there are universal laws in many other human activities, there are universal laws in leadership too. However, particularly at this era when “the world is flat,” as Thomas Friedman vividly depicts for us, the cultural aspects of leadership deserve more attention from our fellow Americans, particularly those in leadership positions.

Culture isn’t the only lens through which we should see leadership, but it’s the one we shouldn’t miss. I personally find the cultural lens provided in this book illuminating. For example, I have written about the failure of the George W. Bush presidency in the new Introduction to the twentieth anniversary edition of On Becoming a Leader, “One of Bush’s major failings, I believe, was his overriding commitment to an ideology rather than to principled pragmatism. In foreign affairs, for example, Bush acted in the fervently held belief that democracy is universally desired and desirable and will ultimately triumph. That ideology proved particularly ill-adapted to the realities of the Middle East.” Cho-yun Hsu, a Chinese historian, reminds me from this book that what I see as an ideology problem can be seen from a cultural lens and interpreted as an illustration of the Christian Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, as opposed to the Confucian Golden Rule: Don’t impose on others what you don’t want others to impose on you. Hsu’s comment is refreshing, “That is precisely the American problem. The Americans have been leading the world for such a long time, but nobody has thanked them for it. Their attitude is ‘My way is the better way. You follow me.’ The Chinese believe in not doing unto others what you don’t want others to do unto you. This prevents you from imposing yourself; it’s for toleration.”

I also wrote about the economic downturn initiated by the 2008 financial meltdown, “They resulted from lack of leadership at every level, including failures by government officials and those heading the banking and financial services industries.” I partly blame this to ideology as well, “because of the administration’s ideological disdain for government itself, one of the of the most destructive forces at work during the Bush years was the corrosive drip, drip, drip of privatization unchecked by effective oversight. It caused the outsourcing of much of the war in Iraq, inadequate oversight of the financial sector and other industries, and the stealthy semi-privatization of Medicare and other government programs.” It is enlightening to see this from a cultural lens too. Liu reminds us in the Afterword that this might be attributed to a cultural bias toward utilitarian achievement in the United States, and so it is not only a failure of leadership, but perhaps the failure of leadership of the American model.

I was inspired by my talk with Liu. I am even more inspired by the conversations he has had with other leadership thinkers. Trust me, you will be too.