This book is focused on helping leaders realize their full leadership potential. Asserting that many leaders today suffer from an “acute case of mental numbness” (p. 11), the author’s purpose is to help leaders “hack” into their current leadership to expose the gaps. Based on the author’s extensive experience working with corporate executives, he challenges readers to honestly and critically examine their leadership in several areas to expose the gaps and then commit to filling them to become the best leaders possible.
A story he shares in the book’s prologue lets readers know early on how serious he is about personal change and growth. He describes a plaque he received as a gift and hung in his office. The sign read, “It Is What It Is”. Over time, he came to realize that this seemingly innocent phrase embodied much of what is wrong with the state of leadership today. So what did he do? He carved the following inscription beneath the original statement: “Until You Decide to Change It”. The author’s challenge to leaders not to settle for anything less than outstanding leadership begins with stories like that in the Prologue and continues through every chapter in this book.
The book is divided into 11 chapters, with each focusing on a dimension of leadership where there’s a likely gap between where a leader is currently and his future potential. Early chapters focus on the leader gaining clarity about the more “internal” dimensions of leadership, including self-awareness, leadership purpose, visioning ability, as well as the tendency to “settle” for mediocrity. Throughout these chapters, he challenges the reader to critically reflect on his/her leadership, for example: “The seminal question you must ask yourself as a leader is why should anyone be lead by you?” (p. 3). He also doesn’t shy away from making bold assertions, such as, “A lesson lost on many is profit doesn’t drive purpose, but purpose certainly drives profit—great leaders understand this; average leaders do not (p. 31)”, or this assertion: “it’s almost as if we’ve raised a generation of leaders who feel they a moral and ethical obligation to be politically correct – wrong. Their responsibility is to be correct; not politically correct” (p. 54).
Later chapters in this book focus on dimensions of leadership directly impacting an organization, including organizational culture, talent management, knowledge management and innovation. Each chapter contains examples of exemplary leadership, guiding leadership principles and provocative statements and questions intended to challenge the reader to “hack” into their leadership to identify gaps and commit to filling them. The final chapter leaves the reader with a mantra that captures the author’s thesis: “True leadership doesn’t reveal itself by meeting expectations, it shows itself by exceeding them” (p. 180).
Media abstract
This book’s focus is to help leaders realize their full leadership potential. Based on the author’s extensive experience working with corporate executives, he challenges readers to honestly and critically examine their leadership in several areas to expose the gaps, and then commit to filling them to become the best leaders possible. The book is divided into 11 chapters, with each focusing on a dimension of leadership where there’s a likely gap between where a leader is currently and future potential. Early chapters focus on the leader gaining clarity about the more “internal” dimensions of leadership, including self-awareness, leadership purpose, visioning ability, as well as a leader’s tendency to “settle” for mediocrity over excellence. Later chapters focus on dimensions of leadership more directly applied within an organization, including organizational culture, talent management, knowledge management and innovation. Each chapter contains examples of exemplary leadership, guiding leadership principles and provocative statements and questions intended to challenge the reader to “hack” into their leadership to identify gaps and commit to filling them.
Evaluation
The audience for this book are clearly those who are aspiring to be the most effective leaders possible. While the book’s content is not focused on the training and development field, the training professional can nevertheless find content in this book applicable to his/her practice. In particular, Chapters 6 and 7 focus on how a leader can address the “talent gap” and “knowledge gap” in organizations and emphasizes important role of people development in that process. From a training perspective, a reader would need to extrapolate from the other chapters content that is relevant to leadership development training programs. For example, in the chapter titled “Hacking the Future Gap”, the author discusses the need to learn “how to see around corners” (p. 35) to develop visioning ability for their business. In that discussion, he stresses how having a clear perspective of the past, as well as navigation plan of the present, is integrally linked to being able to envision the future for their organization. Content like this might stimulate a training professional to think about how such learning could be achieved via an experiential exercise, simulation, executive coaching session, etc.
The assertions made in this book are based on the author’s extensive work with senior executives in large companies. There are no references to research literature to support the assertions made in any of the chapters. From an evidence-based practice perspective, assertions based exclusively on personal experience are of suspect validity. However, what was noticed was that many of assertions made are quite consistent with the seminal leadership literature. For example, the author asserts that “holding a position of leadership is not the same as being a good leader; […] understanding the basic tenants of leadership is not the same as being able to successfully apply them; […] leadership isn’t a destination, it’s a journey” (p. 15). These points about what leadership is – and isn’t – have been clearly identified in the leadership research (Burns, 1978; Bass, 1985).
Leadership has long been identified as a competency for training and development professionals (McLagan, 1989; Rothwell et al., 1999). Thus, this book has relevance for anyone in our field who wants to develop their leadership to its fullest potential. While the book’s examples often involve business executives, the dimensions of leadership discussed (self-awareness, innovation, leading with purpose, etc.) are directly applicable to leaders of training functions. This reviewer enjoys reading authors, like this one, who are clearly committed to lifelong learning; as evidenced by the author’s assertion “[…] the best leaders pursue being better leaders” (p. 26).
Given that many of the leadership principles addressed in this book have been previously identified in research and published in popular business books, what is the “value-added” by this book? The author’s style of writing is what gives this book its distinctive quality. For example, rather than simply stating that leadership is important to business success, the author boldly asserts: “Businesses don’t fail, projects don’t fail, and products don’t fail – leaders fail” (p. 2). The phrasing in this book appears to be chosen very carefully to make the reader pause and reflect on its meaning, as demonstrated here: “I have always said, smart leaders focus on the “why”, align the “who” with the “why,” and then allow the “who” to determine the appropriate course of action with regard to “what” and “how” (p. 28)”. It’s understood that this clever wording is not introducing new leadership concepts; the importance of a leader being mission/purpose-driven, hiring people whose values/skills align with that mission/purpose and the leader then “getting out of the way”, empowering staff to get the job done is well documented (Bass, 1985; Kotter, 1996). This writing style makes for an interesting read even when covering well-known leadership concepts.
In the author’s own words
The greatest leaders throughout history have been nothing short of relentless in their pursuit of knowledge. If you are anything less, then you are not only cheating yourself, but you’re also cheating your organization. I believe Michelangelo said it best when he uttered the words “Ancora Imparo,” which when translated from the Italian means “I am still learning”[…] Learning serves little purpose for leaders if it is not actionable. If you acquire knowledge, yet choose not to use it for the benefit of others, then you’re not a leader, you’re self-indulgent […].I have personally worked with literally hundreds of C-suite executives and without question the most successful professionals are those that constant seek out learning opportunities and who are voracious readers (p. 125).
