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Tuesday, May 26, 2009

I HATE leadership, service, and management books!

Most of them, anyway. I find they often have only a few items to cover and do that in a few chapters. Then, in order to have enough chapters to publish a book, they restate the ideas using different examples time and again.

Plus, for me anyway, I feel like I know most of the ideas around leadership, service, and management....I just don't execute on what I know. I don't need another book telling me what to do. I need to get motivated to do what I need to do.

One book that's really different from most is "Monday Morning Leadership" by David Cottrell. This book is short and gets its points across by weaving them through a story. I was asked to facilitate a leadership training session recently with a few managers from my company. The boss of these managers suggested working through "Monday Morning Leadership". I was underwhelmed to say the least. Another management book? Aaarrrgggghhhh.....

But, I agreed to do it and started reading the book (I had the book, but had never read it...because I hate books like these). Boy, was I wrong. Like I said above, this book really hit the spot on how to get leadership principles across.

The points of this book, and the way it is written, make it easy to ask people to pull ideas from because they can relate. We had a very effective session today as we used the material from Chapters 1 and 2 to challenge the group.

If you want a great little leadership book to read or need something to work through with a group, do yourself a favor and get "Monday Morning Leadership".