A passionately presented, faith-based guide to leading others.
Principles of leadership, as seen through a Christian lens.
Bourgond (Setting Your Course, 2014), a minister and founder of Shoreview, Minnesota–based Heart of a Warrior Ministries, takes a decidedly faith-based approach to leadership in this skillfully written book. The quirky title (and the subtitle, “Principles and Practices You Can Chew On”) refer to a variety of leadership strategies, techniques, and tips, compiled into brief chapters that one can fruitfully read randomly or in order. It’s a broad-brush, somewhat haphazard approach, but it’s neatly organized into three sections, dealing with thought, emotion, and implementation. In the first part, titled “Head,” Bourgond appropriately discusses such key leadership attributes as prioritizing, making good decisions, adjusting expectations to reality, and overcoming barriers. The second part, “Heart,” offers chapters on topics such as “Values,” “Integrity,” and “Centering,” which focus more on one’s character and approach to life. The longest, most process-oriented part, “Hand,” concludes the book and addresses typical leadership issues, including establishing goals and objectives; recruiting, interviewing, and developing other potential leaders; motivating individuals and mobilizing teams; and resolving conflicts. These are all covered diligently but lightly, without a lot of depth. This is standard fare for leadership books, but this work’s unabashedly religious overtone distinguishes it. Each chapter features a sprinkling of excerpts from or references to Scripture; throughout, the author weaves his deeply held Christian beliefs, driven by “five major ministry insights” that center on “godly leadership,” with more typical, secular content. For example, to describe a leader “from a biblical point of view,” Bourgond excerpts this definition by Dr. J. Robert Clinton, a leadership professor at California-based Fuller Theological Seminary: “A leader is a person with a God-given capacity and a God-given responsibility to influence a specific group of God’s people toward his purposes for the group.” As a result, this book will likely appeal most to religious leaders and other devout Christians.
A passionately presented, faith-based guide to leading others.Pub Date: May 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5320-4718-3
Page Count: 284
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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