Book Review: True NorthYour "True North" is your true values, the things you need to honor with all your actions. You can't be authentic trying to be like someone else or adhering to someone else's values because the people who work for you will see through you and they won't trust you. If that was all that True North was about it would be like any one of hundreds of motivational and self-help books. There are the requisite bows to "authenticity" and "values" just like in all those books. But Bill George has written something far more important and helpful than another motivational book that urges us to be pure of heart while we scale the heights of success. This is an important and helpful book because George gives us a way to determine what makes us authentic. That something is our own life story and experience. As he puts it: "Your life story defines your leadership." His attitude toward that story is interesting. George says that your story is not your life, it's your story, the tape playing in your head about who you are. We've not victims, we're people shaped by experiences that help us become leaders and our story is how we make sense of those experiences. George exhorts us to constantly learn from our real world experience and constantly re-frame our life stories to understand who we are, what we're good at, and where we're tempted. There's lots of practical advice about how to do those things along with other, specific advice on things like developing relationships. This is an important and helpful book because George ties his points to the specific challenges, temptations and rewards of life as a business leader. Most important, from my perspective, is the advice about rewards. There are lots of rewards that go with being successful in business. There's money and power and a measure of fame. The advice of this book is to recognize that those exist but to seek internal rewards as your primary driver. This is an important and helpful book because George uses well-told and selected stories of business leaders to make his points. This is a very personal study. George says it's the largest study of business leaders, but he also tells us that he picked the people to be interviewed based their reputations for being authentic and his personal knowledge of them. In another kind of book that would lead to a biased approach. In this book it leads to the best selection of stories and examples of business leaders and their careers that I've ever seen. The stories themselves are rich, well-chosen and well-told. They're not re-hashes of stories you've already read somewhere else. And they're closely tied to the points that George wants to make. The book started slowly for me. I felt like the author was starting to begin to get ready to tell me what he was going to tell me. But once the stories started, that changed. If you, also, find this book slow going in spots, skip those spots and move ahead. You're going to keep this book handy, so you can go back later and read them. This is a first-rate book, but there are some people who shouldn't read it right away. That's new leaders who haven't been in the arena for a while. At that point in our careers, most of us believe it will be different for us, that we won't succumb to the same temptations or bump up against the same limitations. At that stage of your career you dismiss the advice that's here because you don't think you need it. But you do and you will. So while everyone else interested in business leadership should buy this book and read it, you, new leader, should buy it and set it aside to read when you need it and understand it. You'll know when that time comes. To see what other folks thought of this book, or to purchase it from Amazon, click here.
 This review first appeared in the Three Star Leadership Blog.
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