Co-Leaders: Library Edition

by David A. Heenan

cover in with shelf ware otherwise perfect this is a hard cover book

Genres: Leadership, Business

Audio Cassette

First published February 22, 1999

Reviews

[Feng Ouyang · Rating 2 out of 5]

The premise of the book is that modern businesses require more than a star CEO or a lone leader. The concept of coleaders is gaining popularity and showing an advantage. Coleader means two or more people share the top power. Although there may still be a star, externally facing “top person,” the team share the management and vision-setting work. Often, it is the “second person” who does most of the executive tasks.
The book starts with an overview and explanation of the idea. It then spent the bulk of the book telling stories of famous coleaders in history. The profiled people are not all in business; some of them are in politics, military, sports, and social movement. The last few chapters return to the general theme, where the author makes several points, which are supported by more stories.
The book is interesting in storytelling. For example, I didn’t know Helen Keller crossed paths with other famous people such as Alexander Graham Bell and Mark Twain. However, as case studies, I do not find the stories very convincing, for two reasons.
The first is these stories may not reflect the whole picture. One of the stories is about former Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai and his relationship with the Chinese top leader Mao Zedong. I happen to know a lot about their complicated and convoluted relationship and feel that the book did not tell the whole story. Apparently, the book relied only on accounts from West journalists and ignored the many studies and records compiled by Chinese scholars, or even Western Chinese experts. As a result, Zhou was highly romanticized in the book. Such discrepancy leads me to have doubts about the other stories in the book, which I am not familiar with.
The second reason also has to do with material. In many stories, the book describes the feelings and views of the coleader based on their public interviews. We all know that business executives do not reveal their real thoughts and feelings in public interviews. Such accounts are, therefore, of limited value.
The structure of the book is unsatisfactory, as well. Although the bulk of the book is devoted to profiling stories, the general discussions do not circle back to them. Instead, the general statements are based on other, much more brief stories. Such an arrangement makes the book less coherent.
Overall, this book pointed out an important business principle and expanded it in terms of what one should do and not do to support the coleader concept. However, it seems to me that the same information could have been conveyed in an essay by someone with only casual business knowledge. The rest of the book is a collection of interesting stories, which do not add value to the central theme.

[Alberto Lopez · Rating 1 out of 5]

The argument of this, now aging, book is thin at best. That the author had to rely on people who did not lead more than each other and on fictional characters (courtesy of Arthur Conan Doyle), did not serve to impress me. I wonder if the real aim of the book should have been to call attention to the value of "co-operation" instead. I believe that the book already made at least one reference to Peter Drucker's revelations on the age of knowledge work and cooperation. So, changing the title a little would not have been too much of a stretch.

[David · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pretty lame book. Lots of stories, as is too often with Bennis involvement in a book. The book highlights a number of situations in which the Chief Executive works hand-in-hand with the #2 (typically the Chief Operations Officer).

The "insights" are worthless - they are either a poor rehash of Bennis' other books, or just so "duh" as to be not worth stating (Some "duh"'s ARE worth stating, these aren't).

Feels like this book was written during some kind of sabbatical in which Bennis was required to write a ton of books that all say about the same thing. As if he lent his same message to a number of "co-authors" who had an agenda he could tack his thoughts onto.

I cannot imagine ever needing to read this book.

[Janet · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book validated my intuition that it takes more than one person to lead an organization.

[Lori Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

A should-read book on leadership for knowledge workers, managers, directors, C-levels, and entrepreneurs.