John King (20) (1941–)

Be wary of books that need to repeat in every chapter the amount of research that authors did to write them. Quantity will never compensate for quality. If the research is good, it is obvious from the quality of insights and the way it presents the results. Tribal Leadership gives nothing substantial to back up its claims. After 10 years long research they often chose to present cases of fictional characters from movies and anecdotes dating decades back, instead of showing what they actually show more worked on...

Good research also shows outliers, open questions, nuances, and important assumptions it was based on, because reality is complex and it is hard to create a model that will capture all the factors. But not in the case of Tribal Leadership! Here everything fits the model perfectly. There is no doubt that it completely describes how things work.

But is this model any good? It might not be entirely accurate to be useful after all. It seems that it could be helpful, some points ring true, tips sound intuitively good. I guess there is something valuable hidden there. However, it is nothing groundbreaking, rather simple (if not simplistic), and I'm not sure if it deserves 300 pages long book. Appendix A explains everything on 12 pages - you can read it to get all value of this book in 5 minutes or less. I would recommend doing so because the language of the book is flat and uninteresting. To compensate for this authors are overly excited about their findings and repeat them so many times that I had to take long breaks to recover. show less

I want to give this book 5 stars on content and 2 stars on presentation. Every time I worked on reading this book, I got something valuable out of it. Oftentimes, something I could apply that very day. But the whole time I read it, I was vaguely bored.

I think that this is because, while the content is valuable, the book itself is quite repetitive. I feel it could have been half the length (or even less) and contained all of the same content. And a good fraction of that reduction could have show more come from just not using the word "tribal" as a descriptor all the time. At some point, just assume the audience knows you mean "tribal leader" when you talk about a leader.

All that said, I do expect to reference this book often. The key insight -- that groups have different levels and that those levels can be detected and change through choice of language -- is a good one, and the authors present many practical tips for upgrading a group's culture. show less

I don't read many business/leadership books. And those that I do seem to be full of wind-baggery and overly padded with personal anecdotes.

This one broke away from that mould and delivered something really useful. At 230 its a nice quick read. Direct, to the point, and the authors even direct you to which part of the book you skip if they don't apply to you.

This book was very slow at times and even took a while to get started. The stages provide a good guideline of where people and tribes are at and steps to evolve. The key concept is to change the language and behaviour of the tribe to upgrade the culture and move up the stages.
Stage 1: Life sucks
Stage 2: My life sucks
Stage 3: I'm great (and you're not)
Stage 4: We're great (and they're not)
Stage 5: Life is great

3.5/5