Book Summaries – New Horizon Partners

“The Go-Giver” by Bob Burg and John David Mann

This book, The Go-Giver: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea, is a short, quick read. Written by Bob Burg and John David Mann in a fable style, it tells the story of person who was struggling to reach his sales quota until he finds a new way to do business. This new way is to first build personal relationships that open up possibilities for business opportunities.

You might surmise correctly from the title that the idea of a Go-Giver is in direct contrast to a Go-Getter. What we consider a go-getter is quite often a person focused on him- or herself, looking out for “Number 1.” The go-getter is often out to win at any cost. While they may speak of win-win situations, the important thing in their mind is what they are going to get out of the transaction. And life is very much based on just that – transactions, without much consideration of relationships. The Go-Giver, on the other hand, is focused first on the other person. The important thing to the go-giver is providing value to the other and developing a relationship. Transactions are the reward that might result from serving the other.

And this is the big idea of the book, that what the authors term as the “Five Laws of Stratospheric Success” can lead to business growth and success. The five laws as listed in the book are as follows:

The First Law – The Law of Value – Your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment.
The Second Law – The Law of Compensation – Your income is determined by how many people you serve and how well you serve them.
The Third Law – The Law of Influence – Your influence is determined by how abundantly you place other people’s interests first.
The Fourth Law – The Law of Authenticity – The most valuable gift you have to offer is yourself.
The Fifth Law – The Law of Receptivity – The key to effective giving is to stay open to receiving.

These laws are, for the most part, in line with the Biblical commands to “one another”, that is to serve, love, help, etc. one another. And the “one another” is anyone that comes across our path, not just the ones that are deemed strategic opportunities. These laws and the “one another” commands should be guideposts for the way that we live and do business. The part of the book that is misleading is that everyone in the fable who lives out these five laws becomes a multi-millionaire. This is not realistic, and the book implies that this goal of generating great wealth is the one and only motivation for following such laws. I would submit that the true motivation should be “one anothering,” or caring for each other and providing value to all with whom we interact. Even with this major flaw, this book is an interesting and thought-provoking read.

“The World’s Most Powerful Leadership Principle” by James C. Hunter

Jim Hunter’s previous book, “The Servant,” was an allegory that told the story of a business leader whose life was spiraling out of control in every arena. He attends a leadership retreat where the instructor, a former businessman now monk, leads him to realize that true leadership is not built upon power, but on influence or authority, which results from relationships, love, service, and sacrifice.

This second book from Hunter, “The World’s Most Powerful Leadership Principle: How to Become a Servant Leader,” is just that, a how-to book describing Hunter’s thoughts for growing into a servant leader.The goals that Hunter establishes for this book are to: 1) define servant leadership and 2) provide a map for implementation of servant leadership.

The author defines leadership as “the skill of influencing people to enthusiastically work toward goals identified as being for the common good.” The first few chapters discuss the concept of leadership and build out the definition of servant leadership. Leadership is not management and it is not based on power or position. True leadership is influence (the author calls it authority) that is built upon skills and character.

Love is the critical difference that underlies the relationships, service, and sacrifice of servant leadership. This love is not the warm, fuzzy feeling that today’s culture has redefined love to be; rather, it is the other-focused verb that has been the definition of love for eons. The author defines love in leadership as “the act of extending yourself for others by identifying and meeting their legitimate needs and seeking their greatest good.”

The author uses 1 Corinthians 13 to describe the characteristics of love in a servant leadership context. Leadership requires patience, kindness, humility, respect, selflessness, forgiveness, honesty, and commitment. None of these characteristics are soft or wimpy, but are strong and positive.

For most people, the practice of servant leadership requires significant character growth that makes these practices a normal part of daily habits. The author presents a simple model of change or character growth, with three steps. Step 1 is called Friction, where pain or discomfort is felt from the difference between the practices that result from current character and what might result after some character growth. Step 2 is Insight, which involves the development of an understanding of the impact that character growth can produce. Step 3 is the Will = Intention + Actions phase, in which a committed practice of new behavior is used to change character over time.

The author points out that, despite the awesome responsibility of leadership of an organization’s most important asset, many do not see the importance of investing in the development of leadership. Nor do they realize the benefit that results from good servant leadership as it better meets the needs of workers in the organization.

This is a good book that presents servant leadership well. It is always difficult to adequately describe the effort required to make the character change that is often necessary to be effective as a servant leader.

“The Power of Vulnerability” by Kaplan and Manchester

Many organizations do not achieve their true potential because they leave much of their power on the table. Organizations often have a culture that prevents people from bringing their full potential to the organization. While an organization could make changes to its strategy, its processes, its structure, or the members of management, one of the most straight-forward changes that can be made to grow in effectiveness is a change in culture.

This is the big idea in the book “The Power of Vulnerability” by Barry Kaplan and Jeffrey Manchester. The book describes the culture of many organizations that makes it unsafe to be authentic in corporate interactions. Since there is not safety in the relationships amongst the leadership team, people spend energy posturing and politicking. They do not feel the connection and freedom in which they can present and explore all of their best ideas. Instead, the members of what should be the leadership team are isolated, attempting to manage their own functional silos, hiding their internal struggles from the rest of the organization and squeezing the most they can from their individual responsibilities.

In fact, it is hard to refer to the top management group in such an organization as a team. They more resemble a functional workgroup, cooperating only to a minimal extent and only when forced. A leadership team should be highly related and reliant upon each other. This book is replete with case studies of organizations that came to the authors’ coaching practice with a fractured team and the process used to build them into a cohesive team.

“As opposed to a functional workgroup, a team is engaged and connected at every level – emotionally, physically, spiritually, and professionally.”

The first step in moving from a group of isolated managers into a team of leaders is to establish a relationship of safety and connection between all of the team members. With such a relationship, the team members can then grow in authenticity, able to share and explore with the team all of their ideas, along with personal struggles and emotions. This relationship also allows team members the setting to quickly short-circuit any interpersonal misunderstandings or struggles that should arise.

“The height of a team’s performance compared to its potential is directly related to the depth of connection among its members.”

The book presents some functional tools for building connection in the team, for effective meetings in a culture of safety and connection, and for interpersonal relationships. By no means is this development of a safe and connected culture an easy process. Rather it takes great effort to first turn around the culture and then a great deal of intentionality to maintain and continually grow this culture over time.

As with any cultural change, the leadership team must first buy in and practice the new culture. Over time this culture, with some encouragement, can grow throughout the organization.

“When the team ‘plays it safe,’ it avoids challenges and misses opportunities. Yet, when the team ‘INpowers’ itself to ‘safely play,’ the team’s authentic communications inspire emergence of enormous capacity.”

The concepts presented in this book are fundamentally about developing a highly effective corporate organization based on the idea of being fully present, fully connected, and fully authentic. Of course, these concepts are the key building blocks for any close relationship, including marriage, parenting, or close friendships. Anyone interested in developing deeper relationship will find it helpful.

Because this book outlines many of the same concepts that I emphasize in my coaching and consulting work, I naturally enjoyed it greatly. It is not a particularly easy read because of the style. It also is clearly written with the idea of gaining coaching clients, as it stops short of presenting the tools that the authors use to develop cultural change. Still I recommend this book.

“Boundaries for Leaders” by Henry Cloud

Leaders are “can do” people and, therefore, can sometimes take on responsibilities for many things, including responsibilities that could easily be managed by the people around them. A basic principle for success in leadership and life is maintaining a reasonable ratio of responsibilities to personal resources. When the responsibilities that we take on substantially exceeds our personal resources, we are spread too thin to be effective in all that we wish to accomplish. In the book “Boundaries for Leaders: Results, Relationships, and Being Ridiculously in Charge” by Dr. Henry Cloud outlines seven areas in which leaders need to maintain boundaries in order to maximize our effectiveness as a leader.

Boundaries for Leaders New Horizon Partners

This book is one in a series of books that began with “Boundaries” by Dr. Cloud and Dr. John Townsend, published in 1992. The series includes books regarding boundaries in marriage, parenting, and other areas. The basic premise of boundaries is to clearly define where our responsibilities end and other peoples’ responsibilities begin. We are personally effective when we manage and protect those responsibilities within our boundaries and allow others’ to manage their responsibilities that are outside of our boundaries.

Leaders must accomplish the organization’s goals with and through the people around them. Leaders are responsible for providing things like direction and empowerment, setting the stage for the team’s efforts, but their accomplishments are the sum total of what is achieved by those within their sphere of influence. Therefore, leaders need to focus on the things that are within their vital responsibilities and they need to enable and allow team members to manage their own responsibilities. Boundaries for leaders can be defined as what leaders create and what they allow. The seven areas of boundaries that Dr. Cloud describes as necessary for leaders to be most effective are summarized below:

Boundaries that focus attention on what is crucial and inhibit distractions from everything non-crucial, while keeping the crucial ongoing and current.
Dr. Cloud refers to the executive functions of the brain, i.e., to focus on the specific thing to be accomplished, to not get off track by losing or shifting focus, and to continuously be aware of relevant information. In the same way, the leader needs to guide the organization.
Boundaries that build a positive emotional climate that leads to high performance brain functioning.
This boundary is about creating positive relationships while maintaining high expectations. Negative emotions lead to a flee, fight, or freeze response while positive emotions broaden peoples thinking and responses. Yet a leader needs to expect, even demand, a high level of performance. The integrated leader is able to be “hard on the issue, soft on the person.”
Boundaries that keep people connected to each other and inhibit fragmentation, compartmentalization and isolation of people, teams, departments, or business units.
Organizations function most effectively when its people are working together. People function most effectively when they share connection with those around them. Dr. Cloud lists the ingredients of shared connection as shared purpose, awareness, nonverbal cues, collaboration, coherent narrative, conflict resolution, emotional regulation, emotional reflection, emotional repair, and listening. It is the leader’s responsibility to manage these ingredients in order to enable team effectiveness.
Boundaries that steward the dominant thinking paradigms that rule the organization, keeping the dominant thinking optimistic and proactive as opposed to pessimistic and powerless. No negative or victim thinking patterns allowed to take root.
Leaders need to continually audit their own thinking and the organization’s thinking to identify and root out any negative thinking. Helplessness thinking has a way of progressing from personal to pervasive to permanent. Instead of allowing this, the leader needs to change the paradigm to positive thinking by reframing or identifying incremental steps of progress.
Boundaries that align people with the behaviors that they can actually control and that specifically lead to results, empowering them to do the activities that actually “move the needle” of measureable results, as opposed to focusing on what they cannot control and/or is not directly related to real results. Aligning them with the true drivers of measureable results.
Neuroscience has shown that the more experiences people have of being in control, the better their “thinking brain” functions. Leaders who continually help their team focus on what they individually and collectively can control and accomplish are most effective.
Boundaries that structure teams around well-defined purposes with values and behaviors which lead to high performance through defined roles, activities, and mutual accountability, along with the ability to diagnose, correct and fix what is not working quickly.
A team is not just a group of people but it is a group that has a shared purpose or goal. It has an identity, a culture, and a set of values and behaviors. A key element for team effectiveness is trust within the team. Only after defining or creating these things can it operate as a unit to accomplish its purpose.
Boundaries on themselves that keep them from being a closed system, missing and repeating patterns, not getting honest feedback, falling into problematic thinking patterns, leading out of fear, avoiding necessary organizational change, not quarantining weaknesses, and losing control of their time and energy.
Leaders can allow the reality of the circumstances or mission to define them. They can become reactive and spend all of their time and energy on the urgent while ignoring the vital. Leaders also need to lead themselves. This requires strong self-awareness and seeking feedback and outside input. With self-awareness, it then requires setting boundaries on fears, weaknesses, patterns, and the use of their personal resources.

I am a big fan of Dr. Henry Cloud because we are generally on the same page in many respects. Every interaction that I have with Henry tends to expand my thinking or encourage greater depth of thought. Nevertheless, I thought that this book was somewhat forced in trying to piggyback on the “Boundaries” franchise that Drs. Cloud and Townsend have created. I like the boundaries concept and there are a lot of good thoughts about leadership in “Boundaries for Leaders” but I would more highly recommend Dr. Cloud’s book “Integrity” as a better representation of his leadership thinking.