Leader

I gave this book to a friend of mine in Belize who I thought would like it and soon had requests from others. Short, to the point, statements which apply to most people, not just "leaders", were very popular.

I bought my first copy a couple of years ago and have purchased others to give away. This book helps you to focus on what is important and not give up. And, when something has kicked you in the teeth or you have suffered a set back and are contemplating giving up the inspirational true stories of actual national and international leaders will inspire you to get back up and take one more step. Before you know it you will have accomplished your goal! I read one short story daily and recommend everyone get a copy and read a story daily.

This book contains a collection of essays about the makings of a great leader. Some essays, particularly the one about emotional intelligence, I found invaluable. Others, were interesting, but not new news.

This is one in a series of volumes of articles which previously appeared in the Harvard Business Review. They offer direct and relatively inexpensive access to cutting-edge thinking on a major business subject. This volume provides eight essays, each preceded by an "Executive Summary." The first selection "What Makes a Leader?") was written by Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, Working with Emotional Intelligence, and the most recently published Primal Leadership. After years of wide and deep experience with all manner of executives, Goleman has found that "the most effective leaders are alike in one crucial way: they all have a high degree of what has come to be known as emotional intelligence [which Goleman asserts] is the sine qua non of leadership." He then identifies and briefly discusses what he calls "The Five Components of Emotional Intelligence at Work": Self-Awareness. Self-Regulation, motivation, empathy, and Social Skill." These are the titles and authors of the other seven essays:

"Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons" (Michael Maccoby)

"Leadership That Gets Results" (Goleman)

NOTE: Those especially interested in this subject are urged to check out Bossidy and Charan's Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done (June 2002).

"Getting the Attention You Need" (Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck)

NOTE: Davenport and Beck later developed their ideas in much greater depth in The Attention Economy.

"The Successor's Dilemma" Dan Ciampa and Michael Watkins)

"The Rise and Fall of the J. Peterman Company" (John Peterman)

NOTE: To "Seinfeld" fans, yes, he is that Peterman.

"Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?" (Robert Goffee and Gareth Jones)

"Leading Through Rough Times: An Interview with Novell's Eric Schmidt" (Bronwyn Fryer)

No brief commentary such as this can do full justice to the rigor and substance of the articles provided. It remains for each reader to examine the list to identify those subjects which are of greatest interest to her or him. My own opinion is that all of the articles are first-rate. A majority were later developed into books. For me, one of this volume's greatest benefits is derived from sharing a variety of perspectives provided by several different authorities on the same general subject. In terms of value, if all eight articles were purchased as an individual reprint, the total cost would be $56.00.

This exiting book contains 65 characters in the Todays BIG World. There are lots of things to learn from these 65 characters selected specially. To read this guide book about the leaders of the BIG World will enlarge your view in all kind of your relation.

According to the authors, the title refers to five thought patterns which are central to the success of any leader: the capacity to examine and appraise their own behavior and impact on others; the strategy of interpreting negative events with a resilient inner narrative and response; the practice of setting aide false assumptions, reversing roles, and learning from everyone in the organization; the ability to trust, value, and speak from their own experience; and finally, the craft of counterpoint, that is, restoring perspective and renewing resources. "This book is for people who are in charge of an organization and for those who want to be. We hope that each of you will recognize your experiences in learning to lead. Whether you are a leader or a leader-to-be, this book demonstrates how to draw upon your life's rich legacy [ie the family template, the world as teacher, and the moments of meaning] and to turn the challenges in your work into opportunities for leadership."

The authors organize their excellent material within two Parts: The Legacy of Leaders, and, Habits of Mind: The Resources to Inform and Invigorate Leadership. They interviewed 65 leaders inorder to understand how relationships and experiences in each leader's past influenced her or his experience of meeting the challenges of being in charge. Responses varied of course, sometimes dramatically, but all of the leaders seem to share most (if not all) of the aforementioned five thought patterns. I was fascinated to learn (a) how each leader drew upon inner resources, (b) what the results were, and (c) what each leader learned from the process.

Although Mackoff and Wenet suggest that their book was written for leaders and leaders-to-be, I think it will also be valuable for everyone else within an organization who now claims to have no ambition to become one. Perhaps, after reading this thoughtful and practical book, at least some of them will reconsider their career objectives. I sincerelky hope many do. All organizations need effective leadership at all levels. FYI, Tichy and Cohen discuss this specific need in The Leadership Engine. I also highly recommend O'Toole's Leadership A to Z.

Mackoff and Wenet conclude with one of my favorite quotations from the works of Soren Kierkegaard: "Life is understood backward, but lived forward." The inner work of leaders is to learn from what has already been experienced so that such knowledge can be applied to whatever has yet to be accomplished. This book is not only about leading effectively...it is also about living fully, guided and informed by wisdom.

This book is beautiful from several perspectives. As a Catholic, I delighted in the glimpses of the Holy Father's journey through time and around the world. While certainly not a photography connoisseur in any sense, I thought the photos themselves were works of art and their large glossy reproduction enhanced their effect. I really enjoy the weight and texture of large 'coffee table' books printed on such good paper. The text accompanying the photos was a great, if (necessarily) short, history of the Pope and the Vatican up to 1996, which does not stray too far into debate over politics / theology / Church policy, without making the mistake of avoiding mention of controversy all together. I find myself going back to look at particular images, as they convey a great sense of the Church alive, even in countries where she is persecuted. The book as a whole left me with a much more visual sense of the Pope's mission and a greater respect for him as a man and a pontiff. I loved this book and while I don't, unfortunately, own it yet, I will buy it if I get the chance.

This photojournalistic presentation of the pontiff is the best tribute to this spiritual giant of our day. An award-winning news photographer and an accomplished journalist together have brought out the best of Pope John Paul II through this documentation in words and images. There are, as many as 135 previously unpublished photographs in color, of the Pontiff from 1978 to 1995. Each of these photos by Gianni Giansanti, is a work of art in itself and all of them together take one deep into the personality of the Pope. The text written by Marco Tosatti who has accompanied the Pope on his pastoral visits for 14 years, is filled with information unavailable elsewhere. The book is organized into three sections: the Vatican, Private Life and Papal Travels. There is also an introduction that gives some biographical details of the Pope. This book paints a complete and true-to-life portrait of a Pope who has made a remarkable impact upon our times.

John Stott, The Making of A Leader, The Early Years, by Timothy Dudley-Smith. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1999, 526 pages.

This, the first volume of the first full length biography of John R. W. Stott, will set the standard of excellence for the many biographies which will follow. Timothy Dudley-Smith's excellent biography paints a complete portrait of the public and private life of one of the greatest Christian leaders of the last one hundred years. Dudley-Smith draws extensively from Stott's diaries, letters and books and from interviews with both friends and adversaries. He captures the formative experiences that have shaped the life and ministry of John Stott.

Arranged in sections covering ten year increments from the 1920s through the 1950s, the chapters within each section relate key friendships, public challenges and personal struggles. These engaging accounts bring into view a compelling story of the forces that have shaped and which drive Stott.

Far from the doting account of a saintly life by an admiring follower, Dudley-Smith frankly describes Stott's struggles and doubts as well as the excitement of his expanding ministry. Directness and sensitivity mark the recounting of Stott's lifelong rivalry with his sister and the years of alienation from his father. His concern for his local congregation at All Souls Church in London as he begins evangelistic tours of Great Britain, the United States, Autrailia and Africa reveal his pastor's heart and sensitivity.

The first volume of this biography projects a three dimensional picture of a man of God. Don't wait for the companion volume, not due out for at least another two years, before reading this book. This account of a contemporary Christian will hearten and challenge you.

Anyone running a Christian camp, college Christian Union or entering the ministry should read this excellent, authorized biography by another Christian leader - Tim Dudley-Smith.

Time discipline, God and principles drive the man. Meticulous attention to scholarship, biblical interpretation and evangelism characterize Stott's life. Even the Christian schoolboy camps he organized as a scholar and student were superbly run. Here is a great primer for Christian camp leaders. One doesn't usually think of the immaculately dressed and well spoken John Stott as a camper, but this book covers both his professional and personal life.

The book has extensive quotes from correspondents and writers, as well as Stott himself. As Buddism has the Dalai Lama, Christianity has John Stott. John Stott is one of the few who has the intellectual capacity, clarity of exposition and genuine enthusiasm to lead the thinking person to Christianity. This book shows that he's been at it since his conversion at Rugby School, during his student days at Cambridge and continuing through his long association with All Souls Langham Place, London and various Langham Partnership organizations.

Dudley-Smith describes how Stott received his call to ministry, diligently studying both the Bible and his academic books. Stott's avid enthusiasm for bird-watching, which has peppered his sermons on occasion, is woven into the book's fabric.

CICCU (Cambridge), OICCU (Oxford), Inter-Varsity and other Christian student organizations owe a debt to John Stott. Any student Christian leader can gain ideas and insights from this biography.

The many groups that use John Stott's numerous Bible study books would also profit from learning about the man, his motivation and his friends. In particular, his friendship with Billy Graham was described in some detail and together they helped evangelize the student world.

If you are considering being a pastor or missionary, you will learn what a Passion for Mission means from John Stott.

My one criticism is that Tim Dudley-Smith tends to write less efficiently than John Stott, some anecdotes are repeated. But this is a minor flaw and the writing is never weak from this great hymn writer. It is a very human account of a global Christian leader that deserves a larger audience. Take a Sunday afternoon and go to a quiet place like John Stott's Welsh retreat - the Hookses - and be inspired as you read this manuscript. When I bought this book I was stuck after the first chapter, but when I heard John Stott, in his 80s still going strong and speaking at a 30th anniversary John Stott Ministries dinner, I picked up the book again and once I was into chapter two (the chapters are long, but broken into subsections) I could not put it down.

The contributors are people who are widely recognized in ministry. Some are professors, others are pastors, and others still are consultants. The goal of this volume was to challenge leaders to become better at the art of leading. The authors are evangelicals representing a wide variety of views within evangelicalism. Barna is certainly known for his previous works on church growth and trends in America.

The uniqueness of this book is probably the honesty with which the contributors make their points. It felt more like a personal interview with many of them. They did a good job at getting to the heart of the matter. So often leadership books are trite or boring. Many authors of such books seem to know-it-all. I seldom felt that way while reading this book. The contributors seemed to have a genuine interest in helping the reader to become all that God wants him/her to be.

Paul Heier, author of Leading Out of Love

This book was fantastic on the subject matter covered. It explains thoroughly how to plant churches by the 3 basic models and how to help them grow, and how to effectively contribute to already existing churches, as well as full scale churches. Very essential information is presented for anyone who wants to futher the kingdom of God in any way.

This Toolkit can make a tremendous difference in developing your leadership skills.

I have been to quite a number of excellent seminars and workshops on leadership, and always found the assessments, exercises, and examples to be the best part. Imagine how thrilled I was to see that this one Toolkit contains far more such material than all of the sessions combined I have attended over my entire career. If you want to be a better leader, your time would be better spent reading and applying this material in your current job than by taking on any graduate program in business that I am familiar with.

Decades ago, many young people got training and experience as leaders by serving in the military. These days, those who intend to have business careers seldom get that experience. Where is a person to learn leadership who doesn't go into the military? Probably not in business school, where a lot of the learning is associated with solving problems, learning concepts, getting background, and verbally sparring rather than moving people and an organization forward.

A very high percentage of the situations that a leader is likely to run into are handled at some level in this book, both at the individual, one-on-one, team, and organizational levels. I wish I had had this resource available to me when I had started my business career. It would have made a large difference.

Naturally, like any self-coaching guide, the benefit is all up to how seriously you take the content, how often you refer to it, and how much you try to learn. If you are reasonably committed to being a better leader, this Toolkit will take you as far as you can go short of having a personal leadership coach meet with you for an hour a week.

Each section describes briefly the theory of what needs to be done, gives you a self-assessment tool to check out your tendencies, gives you an example to make the point concrete, and suggests how to proceed to get better.

I was particularly pleased to see that this Toolkit encourages developing a better network of relationships, learning how to foster innovation, shaping your own leadership learning, coaching others, managing challenging conversations, influencing without authority, interviewing to select the right people for a job or a team, locating organizational stalls, and planning a business case to lead a specific change. Most leaders I know in organizations would candidly confess to lacking background in at least two of these areas.

The only thing I was disappointed in was that the Toolkit ducks the issue of leadership versus management as being "moot." I don't agree. To oversimplify the point, leadership is about going in the right direction, and management is about efficiently getting to whatever direction you happen to be aiming at. Most organizations have very little leadership in this sense, and way too much management. As a result, clearly this book also has a lot of management information as well as leadership information, but the area of picking the right direction probably could have used more attention.

Reading this Toolkit also made me think about the reasons why I wanted to be a leader, which is to make a positive difference. I wonder how leaders can prepare their own motivations for serving more than their own career desires. Stephen Covey has written about this subject in Principle-Centered Leadership if you are interested.

"No doubt you are reading the latest management books, attending seminars and conferences, and thinking long and hard about the best bosses you've had. Perhaps they offer helpful insight into your growing model of successful leadership. But day to day, despite your best efforts, such reading and contemplation are often difficult to apply to emerging situations that demand that you act as a leader. This toolkit is designed to close that gap, to provide practical advice, ideas, behaviors, assesments, skill-building activities, and methods for leading yourself and others in your daily work...If you are using this book as a development path-to build your leadership competencies-it moves concentrically from leading yourself, to individuals and teams, to whole organization. We believe an emerging leader must first develop self-awareness and personal commitment before he or she can effectively lead others. And you must be able to garner committed action from individual colleagues, employees, and your boss before you can effectively lead them collectively" (from the Introduction).

In this context, L.Carter, D.Davidson, J.Lehrich, and R.Waks (editors) divide this seminal toolkit into four major sections. As said by editors, these major sections are further divided into topical subsections. Each brief 'topic' reading is intended to provide context, background, and insight for the 'tool' that follows. Many tools are then followed by an application exercise that encourages you to 'try it out' in specific leadership situations.

I- Leading Self: "Leader," editors say, "know thyself. True leadership-leading individuals, teams, and organizations alike-comes from within, from the manager who draws from the wellspring of his own character. To trust others, trust yourself; to inspire others, find inspiration in who you are." Thus, in this section writers present tools to evaluate yourself: both your leadership behaviors (the Leadership Assessment Instrument) and your emotional intelligence.

II- Leading Individuals: "Leaders achieve results through others." Editors say, "As a leader, you owe it to your organization and to yourself-not to mention to your employees-to take responsibility for those you manage. How you treat and serve the individuals you lead will determine what you achieve, what you are accountable for, and what role you play in the future of others. With power comes obligation, and a leader accepts sober responsibility along with the power to hire, fire, and inspire. Such responsibility need not rely solely on intuition and hard-won experience." Then, in this section book gives you some ready resources like interviewing, delegation, performance coaching, managing challenging conversation, and building trusting relationship for the fundamental duties of a leader and manager.

III- Leading Teams: "Virtually all organizational work today is done in teams: project teams and quality teams, ongoing work teams and cross-functional improvement teams, virtual teams, problem-solving teams, and more." Editors write, "Individuals work interdependently on shared projects and toward a common purpose, often on more than one team at once. And for the individuals to succeed, for the groups to achieve its objectives with minimal rancor and recriminution, the team needs effective leadership. As leader you have the opportunity to watch and guide a team throughout its life cycle, from origin to deliverables, cradle to grave." Thus, in this section writers present the steps of that cycle to simplify your leadership responsibilities for choosing the team members, clarifying the group's objectives and its members' roles, facilitating effective team meetings, assessing and developing the team's processes, capabilities, and decision-making, reducing or forestalling conflict, and conducting team project reviews.

IV- Leading Organizations- "You may know yourself as a leader-your tendencies, your behavior, your principles and practices." Editors say, "You may serve as guide and inspiration for individuals, and as driving force or unseen hand for high-performing teams. But do you lead your organization? Are you an architect, change champion, teacher, and communicator on whom your company or institution can depend? An organizational leadership role demands foresight, reflection, and planning-very skills that are strongest when assisted by tools." In this section writers present techniques, devices, and systems to leading organizations.

Finally, L.Carter, D.Davidson, J.Lehrich, and R.Waks (editors) say that "Yet this single volume is not intended to be a comprehensive compendium of all the tools we could find or develop. That would be impractical and self-defeating. Instead it is meant to give you, the emerging and working organizational leader, a sampling of the range of tools needed to effectively manage the present and lead toward the future, and to apply them to the broadest span of situations you encounter."

Highly recommended.

An important contribution to a critical subject. Change management consulting often suffers from "hack" approaches. Whether change can in fact be managed is another issue.

A very useful book especially if you are a change agent within your corporation. In relatively short and sharp chapters, the three authors address key issues in managing change. The underlying theme that change is all about people comes out relatively clearly. Though the book is based on much of Coopers & Lybrand's approach to change management, the first six chapters are fairly generic. By learning from the Coopers & Lybrand's experiences , you can craft your appropriate change strategy for your particular situation and circumstances. Recommended reading for all those involved in managing change and transition at the workplace.

The book traces the contributions of Micheal Mansfield as Senate Majority leader, emerging from the shadow of LBJ thru the Watergate years.

His work as an instructor at the University of Montana prior to election to Congress, and his longstanding love of good pipes and tobacco proved that inside the Beltway, "A pipe gives a wise man time to think, and a fool something to put in his mouth"

In short, the book describes the most honorable man ever to hold political office.....either at the State or National level. I am proud not only to know Mike Mansfield, but to be a Montanan as well. Jeanette Rankin, C.M. Russell, and Mike Mansfield......what a trio! God Bless a GREAT American and his lovely wife, Maureen!

...

Put together 18 academic and corporate leaders and ask them to share their thinking and strategies related to organizational effectiveness and, you guessed it''''''''.a wonderful collection of thought provoking insights.

This book is a collection of essays, interviews and study results on effective organizational leadership and strategies. While the book focuses on the for-profit sector, many of the themes are relevant to not-for-profit organizations.

My own background has been both in not for profit and for profit corporations. My reaction to the first few chapters of the book was luke warm. I thought the presentations were too academic and were applicable primarily to very large for profit corporations. Most not for profits do not have the resources, human or financial, to implement many of the worthwhile observations made in those early chapters. However, as I got further into the book, I found myself taking notes and voila'''.. I actually was inspired by two of the chapters.

While a listing of the subjects covered (see below) may get a yawn or two, there are some real gems hidden within this book. I was especially pleased to learn more about outcomes management and new business models. Those chapters gave me some concrete ideas, which I was able to use right away, given the nature of my work with non-profits. Other readers will likely find different gems of particular interest to them. That is the beauty of this book. It stimulates creative thinking and new ideas.

The chapters deal with organizational self assessment, responding to changing business conditions, the marketing of leadership, entrepreneurial efficiencies, alternative business structures, strategic generosity, and leadership in the virtual world, to name a few. There is even an interview with Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, which often deals with subjects related to the workplace.

This is an 'ideas' book and not a 'how to' publication. If you are ready to explore a variety of ideas from business leaders and academics, pick up a copy. Who knows, you may also walk away with a few good new ideas, which can be part of your own leadership arsenal.

I am a fan of the Drucker Foundation's LEADER TO LEADER journal. This collection of articles is just right for people looking to make their organization (or department, or team) perform.

My favorites include chapters by Frances Hesselbein, Philip Kotler, the interview of Scott Adams, and the partnership chapter by James E. Austin. I also loved the work of Douglas K. Smith, Leonard L. Berry, and Adrian Slywotzky.