2.5 Stars
The Leadership Challenge by Kouzes and Posner lays out some good principles that every leader should know. Their core principal is that good leaders:
- Model the way
- Inspire a shared vision
- Challenge the process
- Enable others to act
- Encourage the heart
These are good principals no doubt. My challenge with it however, is that the book could have been half its size. There seems to be a lot of redundancy and extra anecdotes in the messaging. It feels like it has a lot of platitudes in it instead of data. If you can find an abridged version, or perhaps Cliff Notes, that is worth your while. I have a friend who has taken the associated course, and he tells me it’s very good. Perhaps the course is more focused and efficient than the book. For the most part, I don’t feel like I was exposed to many new concepts with it, but then again I tend to read a lot of books. I generally like to find books that are very tactical in nature instead of full of high-level generalizations. This book is somewhere in between. It is hard for me to tell where exactly, since there is so much extra volume of information. However here are a couple of takeaways, that I did find interesting.
- Change is the work of leaders. They know that the things you did today will not get you to the tomorrow you envision. So they experiment and mix things up.
- You never get it right the first time, maybe not the second, or the third. But you are building momentum and commitment to the changes you are driving with every step.
- Chapter 8 is my favorite chapter. It talks about experimenting and taking small risks in making change for the better. It discusses how you can gain personal fulfillment by continuing to challenge yourself regularly.
- My favorite little nugget is a quote they make of David Campbell: “[Celebrations] are the punctuation marks that make sense of the passage of time; without them, there are no beginnings and endings. Life becomes an endless series of Wednesdays.” This is a charming reminder of the importance of not only the value in celebrations at work but also in your personal life.
The narrator on this book does a fine job, and you can listen to it at 1.5 speed easily.
Overall, I give this book a 2.5 out of five stars. It is either just a bit too dated for modern readers, or it could really benefit from a tough editor trimming down the content. As someone who likes to write books myself, I recognize how difficult it is to trim content out of a book. When you are writing in the moment, everything seems important. But after a few reads, you recognize how difficult it is to get through redundant information. And using my meat and potatoes metaphor, I would like to give you a number representing how much meat, which is the important tactical stuff, versus potatoes, which is the platitudes and inspirational stuff. However in this case, I’ll say there is so much meat and so much potato, I I finished the meal feeling overstaffed with food that, for the most part, I did not enjoy.
I tend to listen or read business or technical books all the time. You can see…
… more of my Audible book reviews here.
… more of my Kindle/Paperback reviews here.
… books I have authored here. (Except the scripture book, not mine.)