Serve to Lead®--Your Transformational 21st Century Leadership System Review

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Serve to Lead®--Your Transformational 21st Century Leadership System Review
What we have in this substantial volume is a cohesive, comprehensive, and cost-effect system that will enable aspiring leaders to understand what Martin Luther King, Jr., meant when asserting that "everyone can be great, because everyone can serve...You don't have to have a college degree to serve, You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve...You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love." You also need what Strock offers in this book: an abundance of practical advice that will provide invaluable assistance as the reader proceeds through the four-week process which is central to Strock's "Serve to Lead" system. Throughout his lively and thought-provoking narrative, he anchors his insights in real-world situations and rigorously examines the major leadership styles and those who best exemplify them.
He poses identifies and then explains "Ten Principles of Twenty-First Century Leadership" (Pages 26-64) that serve collectively as the ideological foundation of the "Serve to Lead" system. Strock also realizes the truth of what Thomas Edison once observed, "Vision without execution is hallucination." Therefore, most of his attention throughout the book is focused on explaining HOW to apply those principles in effective service to others.
Early in the book, Strock poses four questions that only each reader can answer. They are:
"Who are you serving?"
COMMENT: It is impossible to lead others effectively unless and until we are both willing and able to assume leadership of our own lives. Consider these lines from a poem that helped Nelson Mandela to survive more than years of solitary confinement in prison, William Ernest Henley's Invictus:
"I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul."
"How can you serve best?"
COMMENT: Just as we cannot be everywhere at once, we cannot serve everyone everywhere all the time. Strock urges his reader to select those relationships and those situations in which we can be of greatest service to those in greatest need.
"Are you making a unique contribution?"
COMMENT: This is best considered in combination with the second (previous) question but there are subtle differences, notably the reference to "unique." Each of us has special gifts, special talents, etc. If I understand Strock on this point (and I may not), he is stressing the importance of making a difference in a way that is unique to us. In a workplace, for example, some people have a special talent for formulating and then expressing constructive criticism; others have a "sixth sense" for recognizing when someone needs encouragement; still others have an uncanny ability to focus on a problems causes rather than on its symptoms.
"Are you getting better every day?"
COMMENT: I interpret this to have two key points: Increase the value of assistance to each individual served, and, increase the number of those who are served. Can I become a better listener? Can I ask better questions? Can I become more alert to the "messages" that tone-of-voice and body language send?
Before concluding this brief commentary, I want to discuss the four-week program that Strock recommends, one that will help aspiring servant leaders to get their values in alignment with their life experiences.
Weeks One and Two: Audit allocation of resources (especially hours and dollars) to serving others
Week Three: Conduct a rigorous evaluation of most important relationships in all domains (i.e. home, at work, in the community) to determine how each can be strengthened
Week Four: Move to the next level by reviewing and evaluating core values, ongoing thought patterns, routines, and "habitual ways in which you process and respond to your life as you experience it."
The details of HOW to accomplish these worthy objectives are best revealed in context but I do not hesitate to suggest that James Strock is both an idealistic and a pragmatist, one who is determined to do all he can to help each reader to become an increasingly more effective leader through high-impact service to others.Serve to Lead®--Your Transformational 21st Century Leadership System Overview

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Taming Your Gremlin: A Surprisingly Simple Method for Getting Out of Your Own Way Review

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Taming Your Gremlin: A Surprisingly Simple Method for Getting Out of Your Own Way ReviewThis is a simply written book that contains very powerful and useful ideas about managing your inner critic. It focuses on mindfulness of your process and disidentifying with the voices in your head that undermine you on a daily basis.
Some of the keys to this approach are being curious rather than critical about what is happening in the moment. This leads to an awareness that allows one to penetrate old conditioned patterns and achieve a state a heightened state of awareness that leads to conscious choice rather than unconscious acting out. It also encourages a playful and experimental approach to playing with new options which is helpful for people who take themselves seriously and have difficulty trying on new behaviors.
This book is fun to read, but like some of the other reviews, I agree that the metaphor of the "gremlin" is pushed to its limits of usefulness. On the other hand, the book is quite entertaining. I must admit at times I found myself annoyed by the recurring gremlin analogies, but I know other people who have read this found it to be a strong point.
The exercises in this book are very good and like that the author included space in the book to record observations and written answers from exercises. In short, this is a great tool for self inquiry and a good companion to combine with counseling or life coaching.Taming Your Gremlin: A Surprisingly Simple Method for Getting Out of Your Own Way Overview

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Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward Review

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Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward ReviewOK. I admit I'm going out on a limb, but I've already found a contender for my Top-10 book list for 2011. The chapter titles are powerful enough. The actual chapters are pure dynamite. Example:
--The Wise, the Foolish, and the Evil: Identifying Which Kinds of People Deserve Your Trust (Chapter 7)
--Pruning: Growth Depends on Getting Rid of the Unwanted or Superfluous (Chapter 2)
--When Stuck Is the New Normal: The Difference Between Pain with a Purpose and Pain for No Good Reason (Chapter 4)
--Sustainability: Taking Inventory of What Is Depleting Your Resources (Chapter 13)
Dr. Henry Cloud, a leadership coach to CEOs and business executives, and a clinical psychologist, has introduced a new term into the leadership lexicon: the pruning moment.
He defines the pruning moment as "that clarity of enlightenment when we become responsible for making the decision to own the vision or not. If we own it, we have to prune. If we don't, we have decided to own the other vision, the one we called average. It is a moment of truth that we encounter almost every day in many, many decisions."
Cloud melds the personal and the professional in this pruning manual of memorable stories and principles and shows why they must go hand-in-hand--and why lack of character on the personal side is often the unseen obstacle to "necessary endings" on the business side.
"Getting to the next level," Cloud writes, "always requires ending something, leaving it behind, and moving on." He takes Peter Drucker's "planned abandonment" and "sloughing off yesterday" themes (see my Results Bucket chapter) and delivers a detailed road map for arriving at your preferred destination.
Necessary endings, he adds, "are the reason you are not married to your prom date nor still working in your first job." Leaders get that, so what's new and fresh? How about his list of the 11 reasons why leaders and managers avoid necessary endings? Here are just four of the preferred avoidance strategies:
--"We are afraid of the unknown."
--"We do not possess the skills to execute the ending."
--"We have had too many and too painful endings in our own personal history, so we avoid another one."
--"We do not learn from them, so we repeat the same mistakes over and over."
If your gut says it's time to end a relationship, help an employee exit, dismount a dead horse, say farewell to a sacred cow, or drop a loser program, product or service, this just-in-time pruning book will show you how.
Cloud uses a simple rose bush illustration to explain the pruning process. Pruning is "removing whatever it is in our business or life whose reach is unwanted or superfluous." It's also a process of "proactive endings." He coaches leaders to prune in three categories (think rose bushes):
1) Prune healthy buds or branches that are not the best ones.
2) Prune sick branches that are not going to get well.
3) Prune dead branches that are taking up space needed for the healthy ones to survive.
He likes Jack Welch's view that a leader must discern whether a business or a division needs to be fixed, closed or sold.
"All of your precious resources--time, energy, talent, passion, money--should only go to the buds of your life or your business that are the best, are fixable and are indispensable."
"Leaders by nature," Cloud adds, "are often optimistic and hopeful, but if you do not have some criteria by which you distinguish optimism from false hope, you will not get the benefits of pruning. Sometimes the best thing a leader can do is to give up hope in what they are currently trying."
Then, this zinger: "Wise people know when to quit."
And effective leaders know when to ask people to exit. Commenting on Welch's "Neutron Jack" style of pruning the bottom 10 percent of employees each year," Cloud nudges the timid leader with this wisdom: "And I can understand why many people were upset with a fixed strategy like that for firing employees. But I do believe that there is some number of people in every organization and every life who will be routinely `let go' if leadership is doing its stewardship job."
Cloud also delivers fresh ideas in other management buckets, including three practical questions to ask in the Meetings Bucket. If a routine meeting is "sick and not getting well," he offers this example: "We have tried repeatedly to use these times for forecasting, and it just never works. We can't get the information we need as the discussion progresses, and even though we have tried, it is confusing and a waste. Let's stop using this meeting to do that."
I underlined a lot of pages in this book. It's filled with gems...I mean, it's a bouquet of roses that will brighten your day and lengthen your career.
Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward Overview

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