Top gun: Credit Suisse chief executive Oswald Gruebel is a natural leader

For many years, choruses of management coaches, consultants and business school professors have proclaimed that they can teach executives how to become leaders. Now comes a truly worthwhile look at leadership, True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership, by Bill George with Peter Sims (Jossey-Bass, $27.95).

George was chief executive of Medtronic for 10 years and is currently on the boards of Exxon Mobil, Goldman Sachs and Novartis. He also teaches at Harvard Business School.

One view that emerges is that the soul of leadership cannot be taught. Instead, leaders are shaped by personal crises or other life experiences. If George is correct, much of the money spent on leadership development has been wasted.

Howard Schultz, the chairman of Starbucks, was seven when he discovered that his father had had an accident. The father lost his job and benefits, and soon began arguing with his wife at the dinner table over how much money the family needed to borrow. According to Schultz, the stigma of his family’s experience equipped him with an ambition to succeed.

Then there is Daniel Vasella, chief executive, Novartis. He suffered from asthma, tuberculosis and meningitis as a child in Switzerland. A sister died of cancer and his father died in surgery.

Vasella decided to become a doctor so that he could help ease the type of suffering that he and his family endured, but he then was drawn to the pharmaceutical field.

In his role at Novartis, he has driven his scientists to come up with live-saving drugs quickly because he has an emotional connection with patients.

That’s a common thread in the leaders, George argues: they have a deep desire to serve a greater goal beyond simply making money.

“Leaders whose goal is the quest for power over others, maximising wealth or becoming famous tend to look to other people for satisfaction and acknowledgement of their status,” George writes. “In public and in private, they display a high degree of narcissism.”

True North also reflects a change in ideas on leadership. Increasingly, the key is to realise that the game isn’t about “I”, meaning the CEO, but rather about “we”, meaning the team. “The role of leaders is not to get other people to follow them, but to empower others to lead,” George writes. “They cannot elicit the best performance from their teams if they are in the game for themselves.”

Several other insights in the book help put the issue of corporate leadership in a new light. One is that a leader can, in fact, display certain vulnerabilities to others. A leader does not have to pretend to have all the answers all the time.

It is perhaps surprising how much time George spends talking about the work-life balance that the best leaders must have. That is certainly at odds with the stereotype of business leaders who put in monster 16- and 18-hour days and never see their families.

George tells the story of John Donahoe, who was on the fast track at Bain & Company, the consulting firm. As Donahoe moved up the ranks, he repeatedly wrestled with work-life issues. At one point, his wife, Eileen, received a job offer that required her to be at work at 7.30 am. That raised the question of who would take their children to school every day. Donahoe went to his boss and said he had to quit so that he could do it. But his boss and his clients both agreed to allow him to start work at 10 am. Donahoe, a top executive at eBay, actually became more effective as a leader, George concludes.

“Integrating their lives is one of the greatest challenges leaders face,” George writes. “To lead an integrated life, you need to bring together the major elements of your personal life and professional life.” Leaders who are well grounded in this way avoid the trap of isolation and arrogance.

The best leaders are also capable of developing a virtuous, or reinforcing, cycle of leadership, George explains. They are driven people with moving personal stories and they empower the people around them. That leads to business success, and attracts even more ideas and people.

Not everything about True North is compelling. The analysis sometimes seems wooden and repetitive; at other times, it veers into inspirational mode. The do-it-yourself leadership exercises at the back of the book (“What are your strongest capabilities or talents?”) are irritatingly sophomoric.

Even so, this is one of the most important books on leadership to come along in years, because it is based on so much up-close-and-personal observation. It is far more reality-based than the theories peddled by the bulk of management pundits.