James M. Kouzes

The best part of this detailed look at leadership in the workplace is its focus on respect of individuals and acknowledgement of the power of teams. Viewing leaders as ones who “enable others to act not by hoarding the power they have but by giving it away,” is critical to the book’s thrust, resulting in advice on how to reward individuals and teams and not only encouraging but actually empowering people to “become heroes.” The authors even conclude that love should be a guiding show more principle (though this is in part warped by their inclusion of love of product).

What the authors don’t love, however, is wisdom. “How to” advice often encourages leaders to appeal to people’s hopes, dreams, and future visions, while apparently not needing to appeal to the reality of the way the world actually works. Consequently, it’s not surprising than, that that they conclude that because their vast survey showed that leaders don’t want to keep things unchanged, effective leaders must therefore pioneer new things. Apparently, historical leaders who fought against “innovators” (who we now exalt as “early adopters”) were wrong-headed anomalies. C.S. Lewis is apt here: “The real job of every moral teacher [which is really what a leader is] is to keep on bringing us back, time after time, to the old simple principles which we are all so anxious not to see; like bringing a horse back and back to the fence it has refused to jump or bringing a child back and back to the bit in its lesson that it wants to shirk.” Constantly seeking to innovate and improve as the authors suggest, will only lead to a “dynamic workplace” where organizations that are “stable, orderly, and run like clockwork” are replaced by ones where employees are on shifting ground where they can’t consistently rely on an organizational structure that is permanent enough to ensure they will always be protected. show less

This workbook accompanies workshops based on the authors' popular book, or it stands well on its own as a series of thought exercises to guide the aspiring leader. There are a lot of exercises, such that it is most helpful to do a few at a time. Personally, I found the quotes distributed throughout the book as tangible as anything else.

This book has reached classic status, and I can see why. It explains a simple framework of five essential components for motivating and inspiring others. The five make sense and are simple enough to quickly memorize. Within these there are ten sub-components and then a further breakdown of key principles. The examples, while meaningful and instructive, get dry for me. In fairness, it may be that, having already been through a class and the accompanying workbook, I'm already at a different show more learning stage. While the text itself kept my rating at a 3, the concepts are invaluable and I'd recommend it (and will reference it again myself). show less

I'm not a fan of alludes and Posner...most of what I've read of theirs is several times longer than necessary - as if they felt a need to justify their position by adding in more anecdotes than normal. This was required reading for a year long management round table and while it does have value, I found less value than most probably would. Much of what they try to convey is intuitively obvious to me, and a I see pretty much daily that heir theories are not intuitively obvious to others, so I show more acknowledge that they do fill a need, but as with their other books that I've read, this is 8-10 times longer than it needs to be. Make your points, use concise language to convey the supporting evidence, illustrate with maybe one anecdote, and recap. If you never read another leadership book, well, read another leadership book. They each claim to have the key to making things happen and they all probably have some merit, but the real leader takes from multiple sources and synthesizes a package that works for him/her. show less