Good Leader / Bad Leader – Martyn Jones

By Stephanie Charming, Madrid, Tuesday 3rd March 2026

Leadership

In Good Leader/Bad Leader: The difference and why it matters, Martyn Jones sets himself an unfashionable task. At a time when leadership literature is awash with nuance, frameworks and neurobiological footnotes, he returns to first principles: good is good; bad is bad. And the distinction, he insists, is neither academic nor optional.

Jones is not a career guru. A data architect by trade, he has advised institutions from Adidas to the United Nations. That background matters. His prose is less scented candle than soldering iron. He writes as an engineer of systems who has grown impatient with the moral glitches at the top of organisations.

Read more: BOOK REVIEW: Martyn Jones on Leadership Integrity

The book’s central claim is bracingly simple: bad leaders are not merely ineffective; they are corrosive. They are “negative equity”, “vampires in the attic”, “poison in the body of the business”. Good leaders, by contrast, are “lifeblood”, “hidden treasures”, custodians of trust. If this sounds binary, that is precisely the point. Jones has little time for the fashionable shrug that reduces leadership failure to stylistic difference.

The early chapters linger on the philosophical scaffolding of “Good and Bad”. In a tone that veers between rabbinical reflection and pub-side polemic, Jones argues that desire and goodness are not synonyms. Goodness is action, not branding. It is feeding someone, forgiving someone, speaking up or shutting up. In corporate life, that translates into a refusal to hoard credit, manipulate subordinates or hide behind process.

From there, the book turns prosecutorial. “Bad Leadership” reads like a charge sheet. Lack of integrity, self-serving ambition, manipulation, incompetence, authoritarianism, absence of empathy, failure to inspire, exploitation, evasion of responsibility, opacity, each vice is anatomised at length. The cumulative effect is deliberate. Jones wants the reader to feel the suffocation of working under such regimes.

There is little appetite here for therapeutic relativism. A leader who lies is a liar. A leader who bullies is abusive. A leader who exploits is wrong. Period. In an era that often couches executive misconduct in the language of “misalignment” or “culture fit”, the moral clarity is striking.

At times, the repetition risks blunting the blade. Many of the pathologies overlap; manipulation shades into exploitation, incompetence into opacity. Yet this redundancy mirrors organisational reality. Toxic leaders rarely exhibit a single flaw in isolation. They metastasise.

Jones’s particular bugbear is the self-serving executive who takes credit upward and shifts blame downward. Such figures, he argues, erode trust, the non-negotiable currency of leadership. Without trust, communication falters, collaboration frays and strategy becomes theatre. Here the data architect’s instincts surface: if the inputs are corrupted, the outputs will be too.

The book is not purely negative. The latter half outlines what Jones regards as viable leadership. He surveys typical executive roles – CEO, CFO, COO, CHRO and their European nuances – before turning to principles. Good leaders empower but equip. They listen to criticism, admit error, celebrate team success and practise transparency. They are decisive yet empathetic, strategic yet humane.

None of this is novel. Readers steeped in the canon, from Drucker to Edmondson, will recognise the themes. What distinguishes Jones is tone. He writes less like a consultant offering a model and more like a citizen issuing a warning. “An evil person will never make a good leader,” he states, without caveat.

That bluntness will divide opinion. Some will bridle at the moral absolutism. Leadership, after all, often unfolds in shades of grey. Trade-offs are real; incentives distort; systems constrain. To suggest that goodness alone separates the worthy from the unworthy may seem naïve.

Yet Jones would likely counter that complexity has become a convenient alibi. Organisations routinely tolerate behaviour they would denounce in private life. The rainmaker who humiliates staff. The visionary who bends compliance. The turnaround artist who leaves a cultural wasteland in his wake. Results, for a quarter or two, anaesthetise conscience.

The book’s most persuasive sections address consequences. Hire a bad leader for a mission-critical role and the damage multiplies: missed market windows, infected culture, squandered capital. Toxicity, in Jones’s telling, is not a metaphor but a contagion. It spreads through imitation and fear.

There is also a personal thread. Jones admits to errors in his own leadership journey. Risk-taking begets failure; failure offers instruction. This humility tempers the sermonising. He does not present himself as incorruptible, merely as committed to the discipline of improvement.

For all its moral fervour, Good Leader/Bad Leader is a pragmatic book. It urges boards and hiring committees to sharpen their criteria. Stop being dazzled by charisma. Stop mistaking aggression for strength. Stop rewarding those who deliver numbers at the expense of people. The cost, Jones argues, is simply too high.

In the end, the book reads less as a management manual than as a civic tract for the corporate age. Leadership, in Jones’s framing, is not about status but stewardship. Power without integrity is vandalism. Authority without empathy is coercion. Strategy without transparency is theatre.

There is something almost old-fashioned in this insistence that character precedes competence. But perhaps that is the quiet provocation. In a marketplace saturated with playbooks and hacks, Jones asks a more awkward question: not can you lead, but should you?

Executives looking for a new acronym will be disappointed. Those willing to endure a sustained moral audit may find the discomfort useful. The difference between good and bad leadership, Jones contends, is not semantic. It is existential; for institutions, for employees and, ultimately, for the societies that must live with their consequences.