Leadership Knowledge

I just read the preview provided by amazon for this book. The plot of “Leadership without Success” found on the first few pages is a bit incorrect, in my view.

Its a simple plot, with “Leadership Ability” on the “y” axis, and “Success Dedication” on the “x” axis. The plot is intended to show that without much “Leadership ability”, even with much “Success Dedication” the overall “effectiveness” of the enterprise is much reduced.

In my opinion, the “x” axis should just be “Dedication”. “Success” would be the same thing as “effectiveness”, since “Leadership Ability” combined with “Dedication” lead to “effectiveness”, which leads to some level of “success” (Leadership Ability AND Dedication -> effectiveness -> success).

Also, if the author is correct about the “Law of Diminishing Returns”, then the “x” axis has the wrong units (probably in order to simplify the math in order to get the concept across). “Dedication” would increase say “exponentially”, and the “x” axis should be a logarithm scale ( log10(x) = z is the same thing as 10^z = x). So, the units on the “x” axis should be multiples of 10 (1, 10, 100, 1000 .. etc .. where x = 10^0, 10^1, 10^2, 10^3, etc). The exponent “z” increases linearly while the value “x” increases exponentially. The logarithm scale is used to plot exponential data values, so this would work better.

The plot itself is meant to convey subjective information (the virtures of “leadership” and “dedication”), so some might argue that using a log scale is overkill. Using a plot to quantify subjective virtues mathematically suggests that the virtues found within an individual person can be neatly quantified. Therefore, the use of mathematical models to represent subjective virtues could be said to be simply inaccurate and possibly misleading, since the same rating (”4, “8″, etc) might not be repeated when different judges are polled. At this point, such ratings become exercises in statistics, where ratings are apart of a statistical distributon of values, and the ratings reported tend to be averages or mean values from a distribution of votes.

However, mathematics is used to model the physical world (e.g.: Physics), based on simplifying assumptions (which however may not always hold true) that allow for tractable solutions. Although the author’s purpose for this plot is simply to convey an idea, rather than to arrive at a mathematical function, using a log scale on the “x” axis helps to convey the concept of the “Law of Diminishing Returns” as pointed out by the author. If the reader returns to this plot in the future, the law of diminshing returns would be self-contained within the graph, without need for review of the text.

This criticism aside, I appreciated the list of laws outlined in the Table of Contents. If the reader enjoys this book, they might also enjoy the book entitled “The 48 Laws of Power” by Robert Greene. “The bestselling book for those who want power, watch power, or want to arm themselves against power”. It is an excellent read for those who appreciate classical literature (or in my case those who never read the classics but who can through this book glean something from them). It may seem too abstract or “heady” to some, however. It got me through graduate school (dealing with bureaucracies, professors, other grad students, etc).
Rating: 4 / 5

This book should be called “The 21 questionable opinions of leadership”. First, some of these “laws” I don’t really agree with, what laws anyway? These are mere opinons of the writer. Laws should have some research to back them up, these don’t. Most of them anyway.

I do agree with most of these opinions in the book (nothing new here) but if you read a book about leadership you kind of expect to read something that you could use in our own life and leadership. Here these “laws” just get explanied from the writer then there are really no practical ways of implementing them.

If you want to read laws about leadership, get “First, break all the rules” or “7 habits of highly effective people” instead.
Rating: 2 / 5