Bottling Fog

Bottling Fog is the culmination of 50 years of work to capture the core ingredients of leadership. Joseph Murphy, a preeminent scholar of leadership, has compiled this book of short and thoughtful lessons designed for today’s busy professional. The lessons come from reading, seeing, and hearing about leadership in various sectors of practice. Murphy unpacks the nucleus of leadership and presents it in a way that we rarely find—seeing the fog and shaping it into meaningful forms, not textbooks or lectures, but lessons. Each lesson represents a profound slice of understanding for leaders, crafted so that they will not forget these insights as soon as they walk to their cars at the end of the day.

Book Features:

• Concise and powerful lessons on leadership.
• Immediately useful to the everyday practice of leaders.
• Drawn from a professional lifetime of examining the complexities of practice.
• A user-friendly style with no academic language.

Joseph F. Murphy is the Frank W. Mayborn Chair of Education at Peabody College of Education at Vanderbilt University. He is the coauthor of Positive School Leadership: Building Capacity and Strengthening Relationships.

“Useful, inspiring, sensible leadership lessons that can enable you to be a positive force within your sphere of influence.”
—Philip Hallinger, TSDF Chair Professor of Leadership, Mahidol University

“In this creative and engaging synthesis of wisdom from practice and scholarship, Murphy triumphs in capturing the essence of positive, constructive, and effective leadership. The insights and lessons in this book call us to understand leadership as an innately human enterprise where attentiveness, authenticity, kindness, intelligence, and care are indispensable ingredients. Early on, Murphy writes that ‘Effective leaders, those who make a positive difference and leave something behind, are people who make understanding central to their lives, and who are uncommonly generous to those around them.’ This book is imbued with this same understanding and generosity. It will make a lasting, positive contribution to leadership practice.”
—Mark A. Smylie, professor emeritus, University of Illinois at Chicago