Transforming Leadership focuses on the ways that leaders emerge from being ordinary transactional deal makers to becoming dynamic agents of major social change who empower their followers.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author James MacGregor Burns illuminates the evolution of leadership structures, from the chieftains of tribal African societies, through Europes absolute monarchies, to the blossoming of the Enlightenments ideals of liberty and democracy. Along the way he looks at key leaders who attempted to transform their worldsElizabeth I, Washington, Jefferson, Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Gorbachev, and others. The book culminates in a bold and innovative plan to address the greatest global leadership challenge of the twenty-first century: the problem of global poverty.