This is a book on leadership and values. It is also a book on beliefs and convictions and their place in one's life.

We are born without a manual of instructions. Each community invents a world and builds in it its own rules and with them attempts to explain life and death and, above all, attempts to explain the self. Each day- to- day affair begs explanation, because no one does anything that is void of meaning to the person. This explained world is what helps find meaning to questions like: Why work? What is the leader's place? What is the follower's place? Which is the model that explains all and renders life livable?

There are many models of explanation and this book explores the Latin American one. It extends the relevance of the author's earlier work, Culture and Management in the Americas, adding specificity particularly to the leadership dimension.

To explain leadership, the author finds inspiration in what Latin America has much of: insurrections. Because these often lasted for years and became organizations, insurrections had to solve standard management problems, from translating the leader's vision to executing performance evaluations and securing supply chain.

Alfredo Behrens's explanation resorts to a mythological trip by legendary characters, a trip through a narrated Latin America. The fictional characters, icons of Argentine literature, are two gauchos, Martín Fierro and Don Segundo Sombra. The first is reserved and defiant, the second is reflective and prone to questionings that lead to new perspectives. Both ride on horseback like knights- errant, only to observe and comment rather than taking a quixotic participatory intervention to “right every kind of wrong.”

Mythological heroes are no less real than in- the- flesh heroes. All, including the flesh kind, are narrations by others. All of our collective forms— families, cities, nations, continents— are narrations. Alfredo's is a story that attempts to reveal other stories.

Martín Fierro and Segundo Sombra have their own styles of narrating life, which is quite unlike that of pragmatic Benjamin Franklin, for example. These differences point to the need of specific leadership and managerial styles.