Robert J. Anderson

As with most of books of this type, the authors are selling a product, and they claim that theirs is better than the others - they used the word "breakthrough" more than few times along with "groundbreaking". That always trips my radar. But, they do cite many other leadership authors, but usually with a caveat that the author/theorist was missing something (that they figured out).

I'm in a yearlong management seminar program and we are assigned executive summaries of various books. If possible, I like to try to read the source text before the class. In this case, the text is quite large and the editor distills it to 8 pages. They didn't do too bad a job, but pretty much all of the theory and supporting case studies had to be omitted.

There are obviously good points to be taken from this (or most other leadership books), but I don't agree yet with Anderson and Adams on their framing of leadership development. I doubt I will as some runs counter to logic, particularly the end point that invokes mystical mumbo-jumbo, so it gets tossed as a non-end point. (It's called "Unity" and is about "oneness" and how the best leader has nothing of him/herself left because he/she is no longer an individual. I won't even dignify that with a response. Twaddle. Okay, a little dignifying there.)

I was quite surprised to see them give redundancy a completely new definition. They didn't know they were, because they said they were borrowing it from engineering: "Redundancy results when one tension resolution in the structure depends on a second tension resolution in the structure and vice versa." Uh...redundancy means duplicate systems to minimize single points of failure.

In one of their cute chapter ending prompt questions, they asked "How long has it been since your world was rocked to its core by something you learned?" Truly inquisitive people aren't rocked much, if at all...that that is even a question makes me wonder who the target audience is.… (mere)