PLI seminars provide excellent training in ethics, character, and principle-based leadership. This section of PLI's Web site provides links to recommended books and articles dealing with these topics.

Books on Leadership, Ethics and Character

Character: The Foundation of Leadership

Character: The Foundation of Leadership (Kindle Edition)

By Robert Vernon

What makes a powerful leader? Is it something inherited? Is it learned behavior? Can anyone acquire leadership abilities with sufficient determination? Why do some people seem to have a "presence" that compels others to follow? What is it about them that gives them a powerful ability to influence others?

These questions have been asked for centuries. Yet the answers are clear. Powerful leaders do have some behaviors and characteristics in common. What may seem to be a mystery can be understood.

This book documents a strong consensus about leadership behavior, discovered as the author traveled to over 30 countries conducting seminars for military, police, and political leaders. It reveals the essential character traits (or ethics) that result in powerful leadership behavior. Rather than only addressing behavior, it probes deeper to identify, discuss, and practically apply the whole issue of character.

On Leadership

By John W. Gardner

Leaders today are familiar with the demand that they come forward with a new vision. But it is not a matter of fabricating a new vision out of whole cloth. A vision relevant for us today will build on values deeply embedded in human history and in our own tradition. It is not as though we come to the task unready. Men and women from the beginning of history have groped and struggled for various pieces of the answer. The materials out of which we build the vision will be the moral strivings of the species, today and in the distant past. — From the Preface to On Leadership