Coaching for Leadership: How the World's Greatest Coaches Help Leaders Learn.

Marshall Goldsmith, Laurence Lyons and Alyssa Freas, editors. Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer, 304 pages. $39.95.

Anyone interested in culling the collective wisdom of dozens of renowned executive coaches could do a lot worse than pick up Coaching for Leadership. The editors have assembled more than 30 essays from more than three dozen top coaches, dividing the broad subject into four distinct subsets: foundations, role and identity, moments and transitions, and coaching techniques. A fifth section examines what the authors call "expanding situations," such as becoming a global leader, coaching free agents and coaching amid workplace diversity.

The editors concede at the outset that putting the book together meant taming a "vast and eclectic" subject that they believe has proven its worth as "a preferred and tested route to achieve leadership." As they argue, the book lends itself to "dipping into," the lessons offered apply to a range of readers -- coaches people being coached, and sponsors or buyers of coaching services.

As it has evolved, coaching isn't just mentoring. It "was born of the leadership training movement, yet it shares the viewpoints of the adult development and human potential movements," one essay contends. Still, most of the book's contributors are consultants and academics with years of experience in the field, not psychotherapists. That should be reassuring to readers who want to learn about coaches, not couches.