asks if you should read another leadership book—or use the money for lunch? Plus,
. And check out these
"The Messy Everyday Reality"
Well…perhaps. Read my short reviews of two new books—and then you decide:
• Read none, one, or both?
• Delegate your reading?
• Or announce to your spouse or a colleague: “Instead of buying another book, I’m taking you out to lunch today!”
THE CATALYST CEOFavorite Chapter: The introduction. Really! Read that and you’re hooked. One of the author’s team members at
Russell Reynolds (the global leadership company) writes about the “ghosts” of your predecessors,
“who somehow seem to get wiser and taller the moment they leave office.” LOL!
Favorite Quote: “To be clear, this book isn't intended to be some grand thesis on transformation. The world already has plenty of those.
McKinsey, BCG, PwC, and others have written thousands of pages full of strategies, models, and insights about
how organizations change. Most of them are excellent.
But what they don't often capture is the human part: the messy everyday reality of how you get your teams to actually own the transformation journey and see through it."Favorite Takeaway: Every chapter concludes with a summary, “The Transformation Ledger.” More zingers than you can count—and these are just from Chapter 1, “Strike the Match.” (Required reading.)
• “If you don’t define the burning platform, someone else will, usually a journalist.”
• “You can’t outsource urgency; the CEO has to feel it, and make others feel it, too.”
• “Comfort is more dangerous than competition.”
• “Manufactured urgency beats manufactured excuses.”
•
“If everyone looks calm, you may be leading them into irrelevance.” • “Transformation is a muscle, not a miracle.”
• “The real enemy is rarely outside the building; it’s the voice that says, ‘We’ve always done it this way.’”
Favorite Question: From Chapter 10,
“What I Wish I’d Known About Becoming a Catalyst CEO,” the author asks,
“Do you see your role as the ultimate decision-maker, or the person who enables better decisions?” (That’s just one of eight poke-in-the-rib questions in this final chapter—another must-read.) I’m guessing he’s read one or both books by Dennis Bakke,
Joy at Work (2006 book-of-the-year) and/or
The Decision Maker (read my review, “
The Problem Was Me.”)
Watch for My 2nd Review! I just might convince you that Chapter 2, “Get the Board Onboard” will be
your favorite chapter.
• When Greg Creed became the CEO of Yum! (KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, etc.), he admits that he “could toss out a hundred ideas before breakfast.” But through new CEO eyes, he faced a board-approved “sprawling list of 36 priorities that the company was expected to deliver.” (Must-read: how he reduced that list to four!)
• “Brutal simplicity beats polite abstraction. A hard truth lands faster than a hundred charts. If it stings, it sticks.”
• “If you don’t translate, you don’t persuade.
Boards don’t want 50-page decks; they want a story they can tell themselves on the car ride home.” • Read the research: “
Global Board Culture and Director Behaviors Study.”
THE PANORAMIC LEADERFavorite Chapter: “Expertise can sow the seed of blindness,” is just one of dozens of wake-up alarms in Chapter 4, “Mindset First.” In addition to detailing the creativity of the Spanish restaurant,
El Bulli, authors Cornelia Choe and Marshall Goldsmith deliver a stunning graphic on page 81,
“When Mastery Becomes Risk – The Hidden Cost of Unconscious Competence.” The four levels up to the mountain top:
• Unconscious Incompetence (the bottom of the mountain)
• Conscious Incompetence
• Conscious Competence
• Unconscious Competence
(the top of the mountain—yikes!)Favorite Quote: (
Marshall Goldsmith is no slouch! I named
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There my 2013 book-of-the-year, thanks to
Gordon Flinn.) Yet "the World's #1 leadership thinker and executive coach" transparently shares the feedback he received from his mentor. Dr. Paul Hersey told him, “You are completely screwing up. You are selling the same thing day after day after day. You are not thinking, you are not writing, and you are not developing new material. If you continue doing what you are now, you will have a successful life, but you will never become the person you could be—and you will regret it.
You can be more.”
Favorite Warning: (Maybe? Maybe not? Read another leadership book?) “
According to research published by the Corporate Executive Board,
at least half—somewhere between 50 percent and 70 percent—of new executives fail within their first 18 months on the job. That number is as shocking as it is catastrophic, for both the leaders who are affected by this silent epidemic and for the organizations they lead.”
Favorite Question: “How often do I actively seek out contradictory information or dissenting opinions to guard against confirmation bias in my personal decisions?”
Watch for My 2nd Review! I made more than 30 notes for my review but I promised a short review today. So I’m planning a second review later this year. Watch for:
• Yes, you need to view the dance floor from the balcony, but you also need to invite others to join you on the balcony—“people who see the world differently”—and can spot the “gatecrashers” you may be ignoring. (This reminded me of Ram Charan’s “
perceptual acuity dinners.”)
• Why, when co-author
Cornelia Choe received an honorary Ph.D. from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, she led a standing ovation for the bottom half of the class!
•
Yikes. Why Apple pulled the plug on their $10 billion project to build a fully autonomous car. (The authors name the culprit: the
core problem at Apple—
and yes, pun intended.)
SO…read one book, two books, delegate your reading…or buy lunch?
TO ORDER FROM AMAZON, click on the titles for:
[ ]
The Panoramic Leader: How Great Leaders See Differently, by Cornelia Choe and Marshall Goldsmith.
[ ]
The Catalyst CEO: Why CEOs Can't Lead Transformation Alone—And What the Best Do Instead, by Constantine G. Alexandrakis. Listen on
Libro (6 hours, 50 minutes).
(And thanks to the publishers for sending review copies.)
YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:1) Cornelia Choe and Marshall Goldsmith write, “Leaders don't fail for lack of intelligence. They fail because they're navigating with partial maps. We call this perspective blindness—the tendency to mistake an incomplete view of reality for the whole. In an increasingly volatile world, that mistake compounds quickly. Panoramic leadership is a strategic advantage.”
QUESTION: What are you missing? Who should read The Panoramic Leader?2) Constantine G. Alexandrakis quotes Mark Twain, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
QUESTION: How are you going to find out what you know that ain’t so?3) Click here for my favorite cartoon, plus mini-reviews of six more leadership books including
True North: Leading Authentically in Today's Workplace, Emerging Leader Edition, by Zach Clayton and Bill George. Who will read and report on one of these books?
SECOND READS: Fresh Solutions From Classic BooksYou have changed—and your problems have changed—since you read this the first time!Resource #60 of 99: Thinkpak: A Brainstorming Card DeckFor your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by featuring Resource #60 of 99 in our series, “Second Reads.” The big idea:
REREAD TO LEAD! Discover how your favorite books (and articles) still have more to teach you and the people you’re coaching and mentoring.
Thinkpak:
A Brainstorming Card Deck
by Michael Michalko (June 1, 2006)
Imagine being called “one of the most highly acclaimed creativity experts in the world.” That’s Michael Michalko, who organized a team of NATO intelligence specialists and international academics in Frankfurt, Germany, to research, collect, and categorize all known inventive-thinking methods.”
•
Read my review (Issue No. 261, Nov. 26, 2012)
• Order from
Amazon.
• Management Bucket #20 of 20:
The Meetings BucketThe result: the “S.C.A.M.P.E.R." process. This fun-to-use brainstorming card deck has 56 cards including two instructional cards, four or five cards for each of the nine key processes, plus seven cards with creative ways to evaluate ideas. It’s a brilliant instant brainstorming system. But caution! It could be dangerous to your boring, status quo meetings!
CLICK HERE FOR BOOKS BY JOHN
View the AI-generated summary of “Mistake #3: Reading Too Narrowly—Stuck in My Lane. I should have read a book on ‘how to read a book’ 50 years ago.” (8 minutes). See the workbook, Mastering Mistake Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—and What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson.
NOTICE! Effective Oct. 1, 2025, all 657 eNews issues, previously archived on Typepad.com are slowly (!) being moved to a new website here at John Pearson's Buckets Blog.
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