You are born a leader and you cannot be “developed” into being one, says management guru Debashis Chatterjee. He has authored four self-help books that exhort people to realise their true potential. But his books are not primers on how to pip your rival to the post, rather they are on how not to get too worked up if you haven’t.

Break Free, Discover Your Leadership Signature, published by Penguin under its imprint Penguin Portfolio, a management series, is a B-format book of 140 pages that gives you a crash course on managing aspirations.

“In the Indian context, aspiration levels are high and the wherewithal is low. I am trying to address this gap,” says the B-school professor, who also runs the Centre for Leadership and Human Values in Lucknow.

“Even the IIMs are aspirational. They leave out a vast pool of very talented people through their entrance exams and the ones who get in do not necessarily become good managers.” And his books — including Leading Consciously, Light the Fire in Your Heart and The Circle of Love — are for those who have not studied management theories.

But if one was expecting Break Free to be a dull monologue on management theories, one will be pleasantly surprised. Instead of jargons and number-crunching, it is written lucidly, interspersed with short real-life stories of leadership. It also has nuggets on personalities like Mandela, Lee Kwang Yew, Lakshmi Mittal, Ford, Gandhi and Oprah Winfrey.

What Chatterjee seeks to address is the disenchantment among people that seems to be growing. And he starts right from the preface, where he talks about his student Manjunath, a B-school passout who was never interested in “cold statistics and fuzzy logic”.

Rather, Manjunath would raise questions about life itself. So, when unlike his peers who sought top grade placements in multinationals, Manjunath was fighting the petrol mafia in the backwaters of Uttar Pradesh. The result was six bullets in his body that snuffed the life out of the 27-year-old.

Chatterjee doesn’t believe Manjunath’s life was wasted. In fact, through his death, a movement started quietly. A movement by Manjunath’s teachers, peers, friends, the media, a few politicians and hordes of common people. A trust was formed in Manjunath’s name. How many of his “successful” peers have been able to achieve that, asks Chatterjee. Another story, set in a city slum, shows how a beggar girl rises above her poverty to share a piece of bread with her friends. “My best leadership story so far,” signs off Chatterjee.