John Dickson wears many hats. He teaches ancient history at Australia's Macquarie University, co-directs the Centre for Public Christianity, and is senior minister at St. Andrew's Anglican Church Roseville (Sydney). His new book Humilitas: A Lost Key to Life, Love, and Leadership (Zondervan, 2011) explores a virtue necessary for faithful service in all those capacities: humility. Leadership Journal's Marshall Shelley and Drew Dyck spoke with Dickson about where humility comes from and why it's so important.

You call humility the "lost key" to leadership. Why do you consider it lost?

Lost is perhaps an overstatement for a subtitle of a book. We haven't completely forgotten humility. Humility is something that Western culture intuitively likes. We admire the great person who's humble. But it's something we've turned our attention away from. There hasn't been any kind of analysis of why it works or why it's helpful for our culture. I think of Jim Collins' book, Good to Great, where he found ...