Overall 4 Stars of out 5: ****
John C Maxwell does a good job of providing a great list of opportunities to improve your leadership and guidelines by which to do so. The majority of the first portion of the book up until the last couple of chapters offers lots of great references to other leaders and quotes as well as good instructions on where your mindset should be when thinking as a Leader.
My favorite chapter has Maxwell describing the 5 levels of leadership: Position, Permission, Production, People Development, and The Pinnacle. I’m in the middle of reclimbing this ladder with my latest organization, and I would like to think I am doing both 3 and 4 at the same time. I am establishing a strong leadership team as one of my biggest goals of this year, and to do that, I see investing in them as one of my biggest goals.
He also discusses servant leadership, but I personally prefer facilitative leadership, because I have met at least one person who misunderstood/misinterpreted the word “servant” in a negative way. Maxwell instructs us to be investors in people, which is exactly in line with a mindset taught to me by a former boss and lifelong friend I met as young leader. When we invest in our other leaders and in our individual contributors, the company gets stronger as an entity.
I also really subscribe to his instructions on seeing larger and farther than our organization can. There are plenty of good nuggets in this book, and I like the overall layout of this 2.0 book. A couple of chapters at the end are a bit too soft in their advice, but still this is a great read. For that reason, I say this book is 70% meat, 30% potatoes.
If you can at all, listen to the audible version. John C. Maxell is a professional speaker and it shows well in this book. I usually speed my books up to 1.25 to get through them more quickly. This book works very well at that speed.
I tend to listen or read business or technical books all the time, but I am not an affiliate marketer. You can see…