The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You

RRP £7.99 Lowest New Price £7.99

Nelson (Thomas) Publishers,U.S. Number of pages: 231

RRP: £7.99
Packed with No-nonsense, Nuggets of wisdom on Leadership
Review date: 2007-11-21 Rating: 8 out of 10

This book is packed with chapter after chapter of no-nonsense, tried-and-tested nuggets of wisdom on leadership. The author, John Maxwell, has condensed some 25 years of his experience in leading volunteer groups and in business to provide an easy-to-read account of how people lead and follow in group situations.

He has neatly divided these nuggets of wisdom into 21 laws. The laws range from the obvious, "leaders plan ahead and anticipate problems" to the more arcane, "the law of the lid". However, every law is explained using real life examples from business and the author's personal experience.

Some of the examples he uses are how Ray Crock built McDonald's, how Liz Dole connects to audiences in her leadership roles, how he (the author) thought that being simply the positional leader on his first job meant that he was the real leader of the Church and how the Nixon years created a crisis of leadership from which the US has yet to recover.

To my mind, the best law is this: People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. How true! This is a law that I have personally learnt in my short technical career. I have tried so many times to gain influence in a group by "showing off" how much I knew on technical matters only to find out that I had little, if any, influence in the group. However, I have observed that less technically-savvy people had more influence by being able to "connect" more with the rest of the team.

The lessons in this book may be obvious to the more experienced managers but are not so for your average college graduate. If you are interested in leading sometime in your career then this book is a good place to start. It was written for the average person in mind. I recommend it highly.