It is better to think of these characteristics, though, not as the exclusive reserves of distinct groups, but rather as a collective subtext for our community as a whole. Through one societal device or another we have cultivated them to manifest among these distinct groups, and so that is where we are accustomed to find them.

But when they are needed elsewhere, we should not be surprised to find them there as well. After all, they are flowing beneath us all, a vibrant admixture of undercurrents ready to surface amongst any of us at any time, with all the vigor and force that characterizes them even in the hands of their more trained exhibitors.

Surely on 9/11 – the setting for Jeff Ingber’s “Resurrecting the Street” – our expectations were wonderfully met by all of those in whom we invest this viscerally vital trust and confidence. Those stories entered our national consciousness immediately. Even as the shock waves of these ghastly crimes still emanated from their ground zeros, police, firefighters, and others on whom we so deeply rely began rolling inward, to the very sources of the danger, stanching the wounds, stitching the injuries, helping us to focus, orient, heal; proof, in the inexhaustible dignity of their response to this depravity, that the barbarians cannot force the gates of this great society.

But there are more stories yet, arising from this crisis. And they are borne aloft by the same themes – the same immediate acknowledgement and acceptance of the need to act, the same awareness of the immense stakes at risk, the same quiet determination that the shoulders upon which these burdens fell would bear the load.

Please keep this idea in mind as you read this excellent, eye-opening book, “Resurrecting the Street.” Surely you will learn much about the nature and history of one of the most complex and important underpinnings of the national – indeed, the international – economy. In fact, you will no doubt be surprised and even alarmed to realize how much more of our society than merely economic activity rests on the smooth operation of this amazing infrastructural market, and upon the confidence that it can be relied upon to continue to do so.

Perhaps more surprised at such realizations than will be you upon reading of them were the people who are the subjects of this book, who suddenly understood what their work meant to society, even to the world, and who then simply, grimly, irresistibly, turned to it.

You shouldn’t be surprised to realize as well that, should your turn come, you too will find wellsprings of strength and determination rising within you from those undercurrents of national character that define us all.

That is the great lesson of this wonderful book, and one well told. Please get your copy of Resurrecting the Street; Overcoming the Greatest Operational Crisis in History, by Jeff Ingber now,

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Today’s tips:

First, many thanks to Dr. John Warner of Ready to Manage for including this site in his list of top leadership blogs, and to Dr. Ellen Weber of Brain Leaders and Learners for drawing my attention to it – I’ll get to the question posed me soon!

Second, I’d like here just to pass along (in alphabetical order) a list of sites I read every day, or whenever a post is published to them, and that I confidently recommend to you as well. Please be sure to give them a visit – you’ll become a regular:

• Cultural Offering – That’s what it is indeed: grippingly thoughtful glimpses of all of us
• Eclecticity – incredible, eye-opening, inspiring, immensely enjoyable.
• Execupundit – the most effective brief reads you’ll encounter all day – virtually every day
• Leadership Schpleadership – more by the author of Eclecticity, but brilliantly focused on the endlessly entertaining topic of leadership
• Mapping Company Success – Miki Saxon’s trenchantly insightful observations about what makes management work
• Three Star Leadership – you must not only read Wally Block’s blog – you must subscribe to it in order to receive his incredible email newsletter.

Enjoy!

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If you look at the contents section on the sidebar of the main page of this site, you will see a listing of the article series that have been published here. You can click through to view summaries of the pieces, and then read the full series or selections that are of most interest to you. Enjoy! (And don’t forget to subscribe, while you’re over there!)

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, innovation, military, courage, firefighter, police, service, government, stability, crisis, politician, direction, community, 9/11, trust, confidence, determination

This all made him the focal point of everyone’s attention. Everything emanated from him, and everything that was sought but not found could be asked of him. This is all pretty heady leadership material, isn’t it?

But wait, there’s more:

In spite of these superlative abilities, he wasn’t the least bit arrogant. Not only did his attitude seem refreshingly humble, but he had an almost zen-like self-effacement about him. And when you spoke with him, he turned and gave you his full attention, as if he was about to learn something important from you, that listening to what you had to say was absolutely the most valuable use of his time at that moment.

Wow! Now that’s a real leader, isn’t it? Intelligence, technical ability, focus, drive, humility, people skills, all adding up to a magnetically charismatic personality. The whole package. All the things the Modern Leadership Movement’s (MLM) experts say are what make a leader.

In fact, they say that those are precisely what make him a leader, and what can make you one, as well, if you only purchase their products and follow their prescriptions.

So, now, let’s consider that for a moment. Do you think that’s what your boss did? Do you think he learned to be a “leader” as we’ve observed him to be from a seminar or a book? For example, when he was listening so attentively to you, do you think he was truly focused on the import of your message, or was he silently reminding himself that this was the perfect opportunity for putting that leadership attribute on display?

Let’s go back to his role as the answer-man. Did he get that (genuine) ability just from being smart, or perhaps from technical reading, or from his own personal experience?

Or did he get it from seeking out and listening to everyone’s perspective – employees, vendors, customers, even prospects. In fact, listening attentively and fully, not placing himself – and his pet projects, personal biases, or professional prejudices – between him and what his informants were saying to him about his business and their relationship with it?

That’s how first-class bosses come to obtain the set of qualities that MLM experts erroneously try to reverse-engineer “leaders” from. Real managers like these get it from the work, and from everything and everyone related to the work. And the only way they can do that is by subordinating themselves to the work and to those who can help them make it succeed.

That “leadership” they’re radiating is really you reflecting back on you, because they have enough sense to know that – unlike the arguments of the MLM community – it’s not about them. It’s not about their personal qualities. It’s about the business, how it’s perceived by everyone connected with it, and how that knowledge can be obtained, harnessed, and employed to make it more successful. That process, of course, is a classic description of management.

If you are all about attaining these specific personal qualities MLM-style, then you are doomed to failure. Seeking the cynically marketed magical aura of leadership will undermine both the work at hand and you as well.

On the other hand, if you are about the work, you may find that you are beginning to be perceived as that mythical creature: a leader. But don’t fall for your own PR – the moment you do is when it all begins slipping away.

You just keep working on how to be a better manager for your business. You’ll learn how from the effort itself, as well as from the unique nature of your industry and your place in your company. Put the leadership books down. Get out of the office. Observe. Pay attention. Ask questions. Forget about yourself long enough to listen to and absorb the answers.

The qualities often associated with leadership aren’t its building blocks; rather, to the extent they exist at all, they’re wholly incidental consequences of the focus on their duties invested by dedicated managers. They’re likely not even actually the personal qualities of the person with whom they’re associated, but rather are those of a diverse cadre of people and experiences that person draws them from.

Next we’ll look a little more particularly at how this idea plays out at different levels of management, in different industries. See you then!

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Technorati Tags: boss, business, employee, vendor, customer, prospect, leadership, leader, Intelligence, technical ability, focus, humility, people skills, charisma, experience, manager, work, management

• the concept being associated with the person rather than the work at hand or the organization,
• the stoutly advanced but wholly unproven contention that the extraordinary qualities of individual leadership touted by the modern leadership movement (MLM) can be taught,
• the disturbing disjunct between the aims of personal leadership and those of organizations – and, certainly, between the presence in an organization of MLM-style leadership and organizational success,
• the numerous fallacies erroneously presented as proof of the notion’s veracity,
• the inability to predict either its presence or its potential in individuals or organizations, and
• the oddly persuasive insistence that grown managers can and should alter their very personalities in ways that have not been shown to even be possible, and which may rather more likely be harmful to attempt.

We come, now, then, to an element in this long anti-leadership argument that stands out as among the most noxious: the MLM-style leadership development programs essentially without exception – and, indeed, basically inescapably – encourage potential acolytes to develop these traits and abilities strictly in order to enhance an exclusively personal power and influence.

Many voices from the MLM movement will, of course, object to this. They are calling people, they will say, to service. They claim that their systems enhance teamwork and collective productivity. Indeed, many will ostentatiously proclaim, chief among the characteristics they instill is the primacy of individual humility – of the attainment of which they, of course, are inordinately proud.

But there is really no way out. These claims are mere fig leafs, and the naked greed and ambition inherent in the baldly self-aggrandizing promises of almost mystical personal influence and power escape no one’s attention – certainly not that of those who crudely insinuate (or, more likely, overtly assert) these promises, nor – admit it! – of those of us hungrily seeking to benefit from their fulfillment in ourselves.

None of these systems examine the needs of the organization, explore its goals and founding or re-established vision, or teach “leaders” how to extract this information and help it become expressed in the organization’s activities. Far from it. According to the MLM, this sort of insight and inspiration has only one source: that of the leader they help to create. It is hard to avoid wondering what exists for the purpose of what: the “leader” to serve the organization, or the organization to serve simply as a vehicle for the display of the “leader’s” superlative qualities.

So, which is it? Who do you work for? Whose interests do you intend to serve? If we happen to see any of the most popular leadership books on your desk, what do you suppose we should think of your answers to those questions?

You will be infinitely better at what you do – (even, probably, more likely to actually be viewed as a genuine “leader“) if your professional reading shelves have more books on management that were written 40 years ago by Peter Drucker or 80 years ago by Mary Parker Follett than the latest wildly best selling book on leadership by professor this or internationally acclaimed expert that.

Get off your high horse. Get to work. Your value, your sense of reward – and your reputation – will flow from that.

The argument against leadership, however, is not over. We will continue next with a discussion of how the MLM distracts us from the search for what really works at all levels of management.

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Today’s tip – Missing your daily dose of Eclecticity, who is on a sabbatical of sorts? Not to worry: please see his brilliant new site, which much more concisely and clearly combats a common foe than is done on these pages: Leadership Schpleadership!

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Why not try out this feature provided here by Answers.com: If you double-click on any (non-hypertext-linked) word on the main page of the site, a window will open providing definitions or encyclopedic material about that term, together with links to additional sources of information. Try it out – it’s interesting and fun.

And, of course, while you’re clicking around, don’t forget to click on your choice of an email or RSS-feed subscription to these pages – we’ll be proud to have you join us!

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Technorati Tags: leadership, organization, success, manager, power, influence, teamwork, productivity, humility, greed, ambition, leader, professor, expert, value, reward, reputation, management, Deter Drucker, Mary Parker Follett

Please do bookmark this page and give them all a thorough visit over the next week or so. You undoubtedly will be glad you did.

Here they are, in random order:

• All Things Workplace, by Steve Roesler.
• Three Star Leadership Blog, by Wally Bock.
• Eclecticity, by Doug Fine.
• Cultural Offering, by Kurt Harden.
• Mapping Company Success, by Miki Saxon
• The Frog Blog, by Fred H. Schlegel.
• Execupundit.com, by Michael Wade.
• The Delaware Employment Law Blog, authored principally by Molly DiBianca.
• Great Leadership: by Dan McCarthy
• The Human Workplace, by Shaun Kieran
• Aspire, by Mary Jo Asmus.
• Work Matters, by Bob Sutton
• What do you Want from Them? – by Anna Smith

Please do enjoy, and use these terrific resources to help fuel a productive, rewarding, and profitable New Year for you all.

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As it happens, if you can dismiss the ludicrous promises made for many of these, what is left may still be useful to peruse, even thought-provoking and helpful.

Unfortunately, though, the intensity of our angst over how we each individually relate to the pseudo-vital subject of leadership can make it difficult to distinguish between the product and its packaging.

This is particularly so in the MLM – with its devastatingly misplaced focus on the uniquely special attributes of the individual. Leadership is what you are, they pontificate. What you are – if you are the right things – is leadership, they add with trivializing profundity.

An exceptionally unnerving quality can become embroiled in this unstable mixture when the advocates of a particular insight-based approach come to uncritically accept their own hype. They can then become dogmatic about it, almost fanatical. Even not-so-subtly intimidating.

A manager recently wrote me about just such a leadership sect, if you will. The group is a well-known leadership consultancy of international reach, and the beneficiary of explosive growth built on the back of a run-away best-selling book by the founder. This book presented the well-worn idea – but with spectacularly well-tuned spin in the telling – that there is an inseparable link between success and wisdom in one’s person and private life, and one’s business position and career.

This group had been hired by my correspondent’s organization to present its leadership training program to the outfit’s managers. It seems, though, that some disquiet was caused by the presenters’ almost glassy-eyed praise of the founding principles of the program philosophy. Evidently, it was even described to the attendees as something that would – indeed, that must – have a “spiritual” impact on them.

The last straw for my correspondent was when there appeared to develop real, personal pressure on the attendees to demonstrate their willingness to drink the Kool-Aid. It seems as though an inordinate amount of time was spent ensuring that each attendee had genuinely internalized – rather than merely stipulated to for the sake of the argument – the philosophical underpinnings of the program. Those that resisted drew unsettlingly focused attention, and it seemed as though the program would not progress until they capitulated.

At this point, the alarm bells sounding in this manager’s head succeeded in drowning out the liturgical droning of the acolytes. He left the multi-day workshop, which had been a requirement, and explained to his seniors why.

When you hear alarm bells yourself during any sort of presentation – especially a workshop like this one – always heed them. Try to determine what they might mean. And never let yourself be intimidated by those who want to rush you along into group-thinking lock-step with their positions without allowing you time for calm, clear deliberation. Get out of the hot-house and evaluate the comprehensiveness and consistency of the case presented yourself. Make your own decisions, and draw your own conclusions.

Certainly, don’t turn into a mindless “follower” of a “leadership” of this ilk. If you’re alert to the phenomenon, you’ll be surprised to find how much of this kind of “training” so dangerously fits this mold.

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Technorati Tags: leadership, insight, manager, training, follower

But today’s subject is one that belongs firmly in our current topic. It is easily among the most astoundingly ill-conceived, and even dangerous, of the many bafflingly preposterous claims made by the MLM.

It is that you can and must abandon who you’ve been, and change your personality into the “leadership” persona.

Think you can do that?

You are, after all, the sum of the immensely complex and interacting admixture of your upbringing, experiences, relationships, and multi-faceted contemplations, not to mention the never-ending self-assessments arising from all of these.

Do you really believe that you can simply read a book or attend a seminar, and suddenly realize you’ve missed the point all these years? Never mind that, as we have seen, there is no such thing as a (non-pathological, or inherently constructive) leadership personality, nor a magical leadership ingredient, or character trait, that will transform you willy-nilly into such an unfortunate creature. For our purposes here, suspend that inconvenient truth for just a moment.

Do you really think all you need to do is to find your inner child, think outside the box, or even enter into a brand-new journey of self-discovery? Now? After all these years?

Can you really wrench yourself out of the path (not the rut) that leads to the “you” you are today? Should you?

You realize that this path isn’t static. With each step you trod along it, you established perspectives, insights, experiences on the bases of which you developed habits and decision-making patterns.

Consequently, the junction where you find yourself today isn’t a simple intersection, divorced in time and space from your past or your future. It is not a place where you abandon one and enter, essentially reborn, into another. You cannot simply turn left or right entirely independently of what has gone before, or of where it is propelling you.

For you do not stop and contemplate the panorama of choices before you here; you add and modify, grow and mature. become better or worse, step by step, adding definition and meaning to not merely the path that brought you here, but to the very momentum that bears you along it, which momentum is also the “you” presently pondering the diversity and realism of these alternatives even as they rush by.

Think you can wrench yourself out of that into some superficial, wide-eyed, “you can do it!” personality prescription written by the latest “researcher” or “scientist” who rolls into town, promising to cure whatever ails you as a leader? The idea that you can taps in to a long and distinctly American sense of self-sovereignty and control. It is powerful and seductive, and it continuously lures millions of us into its ambit.

Unfortunately, the foundation for this one (as for many others) is false. But even if it were real, to attempt to re-write the whole script of your life, your meaning, your core self, would be at best ill-advised, and possibly quite wrenching indeed into the bargain.

And we will point out just one example of why and how in our next installment. Thank you for staying with us!

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Technorati Tags: individual leadership, leadership, researcher, scientist, leader, American

There were two run-throughs, one allowing speech followed by one allowing only gestures. Each group identified its leader based on the roles that members took or acceded to during the exercise. Then the groups voted on the virtues of all the towers – height and stability – thus supposedly identifying the quality of the leadership expressed by each group leader.

This, like many such experiments, confuses leadership – particularly as described by the modern leadership movement (MLM) – with command. Taking charge of a situation – especially one like that posited in the exercise which shares characteristics with a crisis – is fundamentally different than expressing the visionary, charismatic, empowering, lofty sorts of leadership celebrated and promised by the MLM and obligingly sought by the rest of us.

In its defense, though, this exercise was at once a good deal more fun yet no more juvenile than any of the more “sophisticated” measures that promise to identify the presence of or potential for leadership. Moreover, it was probably every bit as effective, even though it didn’t really identify leadership at all.

And that’s probably one of the most dispiritingly fascinating problems with the ever-peculiar notion of individual leadership in modern organizations. For all the blather whipped up about the topic over the past few decades, we can still predict neither the presence of leaders for assignment nor its potential in individuals for development.

But, really, why should we be able to do that? After all, as we have seen repeatedly, we really don’t even know what it is.

Consider the issue from the other direction: if it were true that we knew what leadership is and how to identify it (or its potential for development), then there surely would be plenty of evidence for the presence of that ability. But where is it? Where are those leaders? And where are the inspired, fulfilled, empowered, happy “followers” that clamor merrily after them?

Are they in our businesses? In our non-profits or governments? In the U.S. or elsewhere in the world? Is that what you see?

Of course it’s not. So why do we keep kidding ourselves about this?

And we do keep kidding ourselves – to our own detriment, as well as to that of our organizations. We’ll pick up the current discussion with that issue, next. See you then!

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Today’s tips: Speaking of identifying what leadership is – not to mention where in our organizations it’s located, please ponder this excellent post on culture by Miki Saxon.

And speaking of not kidding ourselves, please see this list of recommended business books from Authentic Leadership. Everything about it, from its individual components to its general shared characteristics, is likely vastly better than what you’ve been encouraged to read lately.

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Technorati Tags: leader, leadership, crisis, vision, charisma, empower, organization, inspire, follower, business, government, Miki Saxon, Authentic Leadership

But for all that, it can be instructive to run down the rolls of champions touted as winners for their expression of this or that management philosophy, and to see to what dire straits – or even oblivion – so many of them have tumbled. What does that say about the management models those companies were used as the poster children for?

It’s a fair question – and not just of management fads in general, but of arguably the most specious one of all: the notion of individual leadership in modern organizations, which continues to be propounded with unflagging enthusiasm by every corner of the modern leadership movement (MLM).

Countless books have been and are published on this topic. And each one is also typically garnished with numerous champions intended to illustrate one or another tenet of the particular “philosophy” on display.

Whatever trait, characteristic, style, personality type, or the like is being promoted, a particular individual will be presented as an illustration, and his or her accomplishments will be rehearsed and cast as expressions of the topic at hand. But just as with the more general management model books, there are at least two problems with this approach.

First, the subsequent review can be quite instructive. Ask yourself: where are all these leaders, or their reputations, today? What has happened to, or has been learned about, those who had been deemed such superlative specimens of individual leadership as to be showcased as special models of it? Inevitably, many of them have stumbled from their pedestals, sometimes spectacularly – some have even been convicted of criminal activity.

Their use in such books is an inescapable device for attempting to prove a point. That so many of them have subsequently turned out to have feet of clay is actually a more trenchant indictment of the idea of individual leadership in organizations which they were used to exemplify than that of the fallen companies is of the various management theories they were associated with.

But the second problem is no less damning. And that is the internal incoherence of the manner in which these individuals are offered as “proofs” of the nature and importance of individual leadership.

The most relentlessly risible example of this is the tendency to use a different “leader” to illustrate each of a leadership philosophy’s portfolio of traits or styles. I cannot recall ever reading such a book in which it wasn’t painfully obvious that the individual being touted as the very personification of one “vital” leadership trait also happened to be the antithesis of one or more of the others, equally identified as essential ingredients of leadership, in the same book.

Another aspect of this form of presentation of the leadership argument is that the persons selected for display as having the desired characteristic or personality type obviously can also be presented as having been extraordinarily successful. The connection between the alleged expressions of leadership and results is assumed to be causative, or is artfully argued to be so.

However, at least three things are left out of these “analyses.” First, the causative relationship is not proved – merely persuasive asserted. Second, in many of these relationships it can seem quite possible to someone who isn’t under the influence of the Kool-Aid that the causation has been reversed; that the business success achieved for who-knows-what reason has convinced – or, rather, deluded -  the “leader” of his or her individual essentialness and invincibility.

Third, these presentations overlook the vast numbers of perfectly similar people in similar positions in similar organizations who have not seen the results imputed to the “leadership” of those highlighted in these books for our supposed edification.

In this context it is worthwhile to recall Warren Buffet’s admonishment that a good business can survive bad management. The problem is that a really good business can actually fool both bad management and its observers into the erroneous belief that the managers are not merely good, but that they are indeed exemplars of leadership.

Buffet’s corollary that good management cannot rescue a bad business should be borne in mind when we read books ascribing everything to leadership. The truth is that the more inclined we are – or are persuaded by the MLM to believe – that their success is a function of our own exceptional characteristics, the more likely is the management of them to become de-linked from the fundamental realities upon which they truly depend. Or, to borrow another Buffet aphorism, when the tide goes out you’re likely to see the concept of leadership exposed for the disappointment it really is.

But in this, too, hope continues to triumph over experience. Eagerly as ever, we buy the books, attend the seminars, follow the scripts.

Rummage around in this stuff all you like, though. Wade through all the stupendous quantity of material that continues to issue forth on the subject. When all is said and done, you’ll find there’s no pony in there.

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Today’s tip: A site that periodically offers general management advice recently posted a list of blogs published by business professors – an interesting idea. This one is headed most appropriately by Professor Bob Sutton’s Work Matters. Take a look – you’ll surely find much of interest you’ll want to subscribe to.

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Want to read articles from the Encyclopedia Britannica for free? Take a moment to scroll down the sidebar on the main site a bit: right below my current readings you will see a dynamically renewing box pointing to articles on capitalism from the Britannica. These are typically available only by paid subscription, but if you click through to an article from here, you will be able to read it for free. Try it!

And speaking of subscriptions, ours here are always free! Why not subscribe by email or RSS reader now?

Technorati Tags: management, manager, market, government, leadership, trait, characteristic, style, personality type, leader, individual leadership, organization, Warren Buffet, business

The falsity of this putatively inviolable connection is among the most grave of the many very serious problems with the modern leadership movement’s (MLM) concept of individual leadership in organizations.

It is most important to see that to the extent that there are naturally magnetic leaders – whether self-developed, indentified as latently promising and cultivated, or even somehow just plain taught – there is absolutely no inherent connection between the nature of that leadership in those individuals, and the value placed in your organization’s goals by its owners and its customers. Indeed, it might be argued that the very hypnotic power to cause people to rapturously drink the Kool-Aid is itself highly suggestive of leadership of which you ought to be most skeptical.

As noted here previously, Peter Drucker once said, “Leadership is all hype. We’ve had three great leaders in this century – Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.”

Consider this: when the assorted MLM gurus trot out their exemplars of the various representations they offer of the “essential” leadership characteristics, they tend to use one such ideal for each trait. Ever notice that? The thing is, if you look closer, you will find that many of those celebrated for their expression of one “vital” trait simply don’t have many of the others so described – or even, in truth, are infamous for having the opposite of such another trait.

But Drucker’s alarmingly influential trio and countless other such examples throughout political, military, and business history, ancient and modern, tend to be the complete package – virtual poster-children for MLM depictions of leadership. From passion to vision to humility to, in their own tortuously distorted ways, integrity and honesty. Certainly even today it is disturbingly easy to find such individuals who manifestly have it all.

Does anyone in your organization have them all? Are you sure you want them there? How about the “leaders” you believe you are selecting and developing in your training programs? How wise is it to instill in such as them the inevitable sense of entitlement and expectation of followership, and then to release them back into your units? Similarly, how sure are you that those outside candidates you recruit so confidently because they most completely fit the trait templates for leadership are really safe to set loose on your organizations?

Whenever you discuss the notion of individual leadership in organizations – especially in your organizations – be sure to address as well the question of what it is, to challenge the demonstrably untenable assumption that it is somehow an inherently constructive force in your midst. Do not engage in discussion of leadership on its terms. Insist on doing so on the basis of your own carefully determined and delineated requirements. You may be surprised what you actually begin to see.

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Today’s tip: But don’t just take my word for it. See this sensible dispersion of much of the hype surrounding leadership in this essay by Mark Henricks at BNET.

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Did you know that as a subscriber to this blog (by either RSS reader or email), you are entitled to a FREE download (.pdf format, 344KB) of the first chapter from Jim’s critically-acclaimed book, Managing Leadership? Download your free chapter now! (Even if you haven’t subscribed, yet – download it anyway! – (and then subscribe!))

Who doesn’t want to feel they have such a profound understanding of and contact with the reality that drives their business? Who doesn’t want to be free of the glistening but ephemeral management fads that waft constantly by so noisily but fleetingly?

Gino Wickman proposes a specific series of components for accomplishing this degree of control and insight. These range from the obligatory (but, here, intelligently presented) vision, to taking action – with terrific discussions of key elements such as selecting and evaluating data to formulating issues and making decisions.

The author’s background is in sales and training, and you will see elements of this in your reading – you may feel that your arm is being twisted a bit with enthusiastically related success stories, or even your leg being pulled with various rapport-building moral-laden anecdotes.

But the core experience of reading this book is one of straight-talk that speaks directly to your problems, immensely sensible integration of foundation concepts pointing straight to solutions to those problems, and solid templates that can easily be adapted to your circumstances to help you put it all to work for you.

Importantly (and thankfully), Wickman doesn’t pretend to be revealing the heretofore secret formula for successful management, products of his own unapproachably profound insight and genius. Rather, he frankly admits that he is straightforwardly and practically reporting a comprehensive approach to management that incorporates the best of best-practices and hard-won common sense, the bulk of which he has learned from others. Moreover, he always acknowledges and attributes the true sources of the ideas he integrates into this book – a practice that is, sadly, not always to be found among even the best-known management writers.

As a consequence, Traction offers a breath of fresh air amid much of the wide-eyed froth spraying out at us from so many of the management books produced today. While it is targeted to the owners and managers of robust small businesses, it is also highly recommended for entrepreneurs, and for unit managers of larger corporations as well.

Traction by Gino Wickman – a pleasant and insightful read, and highly recommended – enjoy!

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Today’s tip: Speaking of pleasant and insightful reading, onlineclasses.org has developed a list of 25 biographies recommended for everyone in a leadership position. Perhaps you will find, as I did, some selections that seem peculiar in such a collection, but surely you will also find, as I also did, many more that you will be eager to add to your reading list.

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If you look at the contents section on the sidebar of the main page of this site, you will see a listing of the article series that have been published here. You can click through to view summaries of the pieces, and then read the full series or selections that are of most interest to you. Enjoy! (And don’t forget to subscribe, while you’re over there!)

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