At first blush, the ancient biblical figure of Moses does not appear to have anything in common with today's political or financial leaders. What Dr. Arthur Wolak has accomplished in his work is to show us that, in fact, Moses has a great deal to teach contemporary leaders. Dr. Wolak also succeeds in connecting the most current work on effective leadership with the figure of Moses, as well as in demonstrating that all the leadership skills most desired today have their roots in the text of the Hebrew Bible as personified by Moses.

Dr. Wolak carefully and thoroughly outlines an amazing array of leadership characteristics described in the Hebrew Bible that are associated with Moses. After reading this work, one is confronted with the following list of leadership traits: humility, empathy, power sharing, vision, tenacity, heroism, self-reflection, patience, charisma, wisdom, compassion and perseverance. In addition, Moses is also shown to exhibit the ability to engender trust, to inspire others, to resolve conflicts, to push people beyond their boundaries, to delegate and to speak truth to power.

This list of qualifications at first glance seems an impossible one for any single human being to possess and more appropriate perhaps for a messianic figure. What Moses shows us, however, is that one human being can reach many, if not most, of these leadership traits, if he or she is willing to take on the lifelong discipline of continual character development and moral growth necessary to foster these traits. What Dr. Wolak has done is to show us that the best leaders are those who strive constantly for self-development first before expecting this from others.

Dr. Wolak also demonstrates the ways in which Moses intuitively moves between the roles of leader and manager, and how he succeeds in many different forms of leadership— transactional, transformational and visionary. At the same time, this work focuses on the important theme of the many human imperfections associated with Moses. As great a leader as he is, Moses is just a human being with humanity's inherent flaws. His anger can get out of control; he is not an eloquent orator due to a speech impediment; he has moments of self-doubt and fear. Yet these very weaknesses are what contribute to his great leadership.