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

Burns illuminates the evolution of leadership structures, from the chieftains of tribal African societies, through Europe’s absolute monarchies, to the blossoming of the Enlightenment’s ideals of liberty and democracy. Along the way he looks at key leaders who attempted to transform their worlds—Elizabeth 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.