Philip Selznick has profoundly affected how all serious students of organizations think about their subject. Leadership in Administration is, perhaps, his masterpiece: a lucid, rigorous, yet humane analysis of the essential task of leadership that brilliantly reaffirms the organic, value-infused character of a successful enterprise, whether private or public. The central concepts of the book--'mission,' 'distinctive competence'--have become so much a part of our vocabulary that we sometimes forget they had to be invented and that Selznick invented them. His reminder that the true exercise of leadership transcends a concern with mere efficiency is even more appropriate in today's era of quasi-scientific thought about organizations than it was when, presciently, he first set it forth in 1957. -- James Q. Wilson, Harvard University