(FORTUNE Magazine) – Are you like me? Does the word "leadership" in a book title make your eyes glaze over and your mind wander toward lunch? James O'Toole means to change that, and in Leadership A to Z: A Guide for the Appropriately Ambitious (Jossey-Bass, $22) he succeeds. A former McKinsey consultant with a string of other impressive credentials, O'Toole is that rarity among management-theory wonks: a guy you might actually want to have lunch with.

"Most CEOs find cogent reasons for not leading--and excuse themselves from action by embracing one or more excuses," O'Toole writes. "The real culprit is their lack of appropriate ambition"--which he defines as wanting true greatness for one's company and being personally committed to do whatever it may take to achieve that. How? Ah. Instead of focusing, as most leadership tomes do, on who leaders are--their character, style, charisma, and so on--this book looks closely at what great leaders actually do: "It's highly unlikely that you can become someone you aren't, yet it's quite likely that you can learn from what others have already done.... What successful leaders do is both learnable and replicable."

As the title implies, Leadership A to Z is organized alphabetically by topic, from "Apologia" to "Zenith" (one entry under "L" is "Lenin, Hitler, et alia"), in bite-sized chunks of two to four pages that are meant to be pondered between meetings or while waiting for a plane. But what a lot O'Toole crams in here, drawing on examples from Mohandas Gandhi to Abraham Lincoln to Roger Enrico of PepsiCo to pro basketball coach Pat Riley. He's a master of the acerbic observation: "Change-management processes typically partake of the characteristics of cookbook recipes.... This is attractive because it gives the illusion of order.... In fact, change can't be managed." What real leaders do is get out of the way.

If you think you can't lead because it isn't in your job description ("the biggest cop-out since Theodore Kaczynski blamed his mother"), see "You, the Leader." O'Toole says that if you tried to lead once but no one followed, try again: "Almost everybody fails the first time." Nice to know.

--Anne Fisher