Three Star Leadership

Reading What Made jack welch Jack Welch is like panning for gold. You have to sift through a lot of sludge to find the gold. The gold is randomly distributed. And you may or may not find enough to outweigh the discomfort of the process.

If you expect to learn more about Jack Welch and his development, don't buy this book. Despite the title there is nothing new here and what there is taken from his biography, Jack Straight from the Gut. That's not my judgment, it's explicitly stated in the footnote on page 51.

If you expect a coherent and well-structured approach to developing leadership skills, don't buy this book. The author sets out to define ten kinds of shaping experiences, for example.

That would have been a good organizing principle for the book. Many people who study leadership and leadership development have turned their attention to those shaping experiences since Warren Bennis published Geeks and Geezers and called them "crucibles."

But only some of the ten are shaping experiences. You can seek out situations that offer opportunities, for example, to build a team or solve a key puzzle. Those would be shaping experiences. But "look in the mirror" is just advice on what to do, and "develop your crap detector" is advice to learn a particular set of skills.

That might have been OK for me if the book had been organized around the "shaping experiences." It's not. It seemed to me like a collection of chapters, each with some good content, thrown together on the word processor.

Within the chapters you are sometimes left hanging or presented with poorly chosen examples. On page 101 we get the story of the author's friend Pete. Pete takes an ethical stand. Pete gets fired. End of story. What happened to Pete? How was this a leadership development experience? What did Pete learn from it? What should we learn from it?

In the same chapter we have the example of Mike making what is presented as a good ethical choice. It starts out like it might be both helpful and inspirational. Mike is in a hospitality company that is making hidden charges to customers. He quits over the issue.

Sounds powerful, right? Wrong. Mike doesn't do anything for years. He only acts at a meeting after someone else raises the issue of unethical behavior. He does, indeed, quit, but he heads off to retirement, not to search for another job.

We're told that "Mike was true to his values." Well, sort of. Pete was true to his values and got fired for it. Mike waited until it was safe to be true to his values and then made a dramatic show of riding off into the sunset with his pension in his saddle bags.

If you enjoy good writing and careful attention to detail, don't buy this book. There were several things that simply made me crazy while I read.

There are errors that should have been caught by an editor. One is on page 38.

"Dr. Edwards Deming, the icon of the quality movement, puts 'drive out fear' at the top of the list of what to do to make an organization great."

Leaving aside the uncommon rendering of Deming's name and the possibility that someone like Joe Juran might also be an icon of the quality movement, the fact is that Deming doesn't put "drive out fear" at the top of the list. It's firmly in the middle of the pack at number eight of his 14 Points. When I catch something like that, I wonder what else in the book is wrong.

The author also leaves out things should certainly rate mention in a book like this. Bob Kerrey, for example, is mentioned on several pages in this book. But there's no mention of his Medal of Honor.

And there are irritating little writing things. Take the treatment of James Lipton, known mostly for hosting "Inside the Actor's Studio," and a man of achievement in many areas. I've never heard him referred to as "Jim" before, as he is in one part of the book. But he's "James" in another part and there's no clear reason for the difference.

There is value in this book, but it's the gold amidst the sludge. You can use the first part of the author's list of "shaping experiences" as a guide for your own development. There are tidbits from the people that the author writes about. Bob Kerrey's description of the progression in leadership development (pg 76) is excellent.

The stories of individual named leaders are valuable, too. But because of the way the book is structured, they're not always easy to find or tie together. There's value in those nuggets, but you're going to have to work at digging them out.

Despite everything I've written so far, this may be a book that you will get value from. It's not easy to dismiss a book with as many gold nuggets scattered throughout. But it's also foolish to ignore the amount of effort you'll need to find them and bring them together.

To see what other folks thought of this book, or to purchase it from Amazon, click here.

This article first appeared in the Three Star Leadership Blog.