Journal of the Spanish Institute for Strategic Studies Núm. 12 / 2018 Revista del Instituto Español de Estudios Estratégicos n.º 12 - Año: 2018 - Págs.: 439 a 443 442442 the responsibility and capacity to make this happen. We can say, however, that Aznar has essentially accomplished what he set out to do. Because Repensando el liderazgo estratégico is a useful book for both business and military leaders, especially because of the wealth of information and concepts it offers. We must stress, however, that it is not a quick guide or textbook, but, and this is worth repeating, a theoretical text to be digested slowly, not devoured in one sitting. Quite the opposite, therefore, to the many books published year after year on the subject of leadership, including the self-help style books that make the best-seller list. In other words, if you are looking for quick and easy solutions, you’d better read something else. But if you are looking for ideas, this book is the one for you. Just as Federico Aznar likes to quote the classics to support and illustrate his ideas, I recall here a well-known quotation from another military man and writer – Pliny the Elder – who Cervantes quoted in Don Quixote: “There is no book so bad...that it does not have something good in it.” While this does not accurately describe Aznar’s work, because it is a good book, it can be inverted to infer that there is no book so good that it does not have something bad or, to be less drastic, does not have some shortcoming or limitation. And Aznar’s book, like those of most authors, is no exception to this rule. And while none of these take from the value of the book, we believe it has at least two shortcomings: the first relates to the content and the second to the methodology. As mentioned earlier, the content of Aznar’s book is comprehensive. And we cannot reproach him for being exhaustive because, with the wealth of information available to us today, no book can be otherwise. However, we can question the type of referen-ces he uses to support his work. For readers who have no specialist military training, the extensive military bibliography Aznar uses is another of the book’s strengths. This bibliography is essential, although not only in relation to strategic thinking. However, when it comes to references to civilian material, mainly on the subject of leadership, the author fails to capitalise on the wealth of empirical knowledge developed in the field of academics, particularly in areas such as social and organisational psychology. We were surprised, for instance, to find no reference whatsoever to the studies on lea-dership and culture conducted by the Globe Project, possibly the most powerful and comprehensive empirical research project in the world, conducted over a period of more than twenty years, with samples from 62 countries and data collected on more than 17,000 research subjects to date (the study is still underway). The other limitation we encounter with Aznar’s book is minor and concerns the method, or the way he chose to express and illustrate the multitude of ideas he offers and discusses. As was the case with his two previous and otherwise excellent books (Entender la guerra en el siglo XXI and La ecuación de la guerra), Aznar quotes other authors extensively. Many of these quotations are of excellent literary quality, and none of them are inappropriate, quite the contrary. But, even so, they seem excessive. It is almost impossible to find a paragraph that does not include one or more excerpts from other works, and this display of erudition has two consequences: the first is that the text is longer than necessary, although in many cases the length is offset by the illustrative value of the quotation or reference; the second is that the opinions of other writers tend to disorientate the reader as regards the opinion of the author himself.
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