New Book Review: "Leadership Beyond Reason"
New book review for Leadership Beyond Reason: How Great Leaders Succeed by Harnessing the Power of Their Values, Feelings, and Intuition, by Dr. John Townsend, Thomas Nelson, 2009:
Copy provided by Amazon.
Townsend explains quite plainly in his introduction that "great leaders succeed by harnessing the power of both the external world and the internal world. You, as a leader, are probably more trained, prepared, and experienced in the external world than you are in the inner one. Most likely, you are able to amass large amounts of valuable information from reports, research, journals, and interviews. And you need that information: it is critical to your success as a leader. At the same time, you also need access to data within you that is just as valuable and helpful to how you lead, come to conclusions, and make decisions. This book is designed to help you understand what is inside you – what is 'beyond reason' – and how to use that to help you succeed".
What flows from this premise are discussions on values (the bedrock of leadership), thoughts (leaders think about thinking), emotions (the unlikely allies in leadership), relationships (connecting with those you lead), and transformation (growing as a leader). In general, the content of the discussions grows stronger as the book progresses since much of the earlier portions of the text are not particularly groundbreaking.
One of the best quotes of the book is the following: "The best way any leader can use her mind to think in ways that work for her organization is to remember that reality is in charge. It is not divided. There are no inner and outer realities that are ultimately opposed. Both sources of truth must be subject to what is truly true. So in an ideal setting, your intuition should agree with your conscious thinking". Townsend's discussion on cognitive distortions – helplessness, passivity, negativity, defensive thinking, all-or-nothing thinking, and false self-thinking – is also well done.