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Lessons From the Top: The Three Stories That Successful Leaders Tell
"This brilliant book has some of the greatest tales of the past two centuries."—Press Association
Through the stories they tell, the most successful leaders educate, persuade, and bring about change, but we rarely have the background knowledge to explore how they do so. In this hugely insightful guide to getting to the top, leading journalist Gavin Esler presents firsthand knowledge of the secrets of those who achieve power based on over thirty years' experience interviewing world famous figures from Bill Clinton to Angelina Jolie.
Introducing the questions every leader must answer—and the elements that the best stories must contain—Esler explains how creating a leadership story can promote success at all levels, whether its running for the US presidency or applying for a place at college.
While many essentials of storytelling have stood the test of time, he examines the opportunities and pressures created by twenty-first century phenomena such as twenty-four hour news, and what they tell us about how to reach the top—and how to judge those already there. Spanning fields from business and culture to the military and even taking in lessons from terrorism, Lessons from the Top offers a fascinating portrait of leadership in the modern world—and shows how the methods of the most powerful leaders could work for you.
Gavin Esler is an award-winning television and radio broadcaster, novelist, and journalist. He currently presents Newsnight on BBC2 and Dateline London which goes out weekly on BBC World.
Through the stories they tell, the most successful leaders educate, persuade, and bring about change, but we rarely have the background knowledge to explore how they do so. In this hugely insightful guide to getting to the top, leading journalist Gavin Esler presents firsthand knowledge of the secrets of those who achieve power based on over thirty years' experience interviewing world famous figures from Bill Clinton to Angelina Jolie.
Introducing the questions every leader must answer—and the elements that the best stories must contain—Esler explains how creating a leadership story can promote success at all levels, whether its running for the US presidency or applying for a place at college.
While many essentials of storytelling have stood the test of time, he examines the opportunities and pressures created by twenty-first century phenomena such as twenty-four hour news, and what they tell us about how to reach the top—and how to judge those already there. Spanning fields from business and culture to the military and even taking in lessons from terrorism, Lessons from the Top offers a fascinating portrait of leadership in the modern world—and shows how the methods of the most powerful leaders could work for you.
Gavin Esler is an award-winning television and radio broadcaster, novelist, and journalist. He currently presents Newsnight on BBC2 and Dateline London which goes out weekly on BBC World.
- GenresBusinessLeadership
256 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2012
2 people are currently reading
46 people want to read
About the author
Gavin Esler
14 books18 followersGavin Esler is an award winning television and radio broadcaster, novelist and journalist. He is the author of five novels and two non-fiction books, The United States of Anger, and most recently Lessons from the Top, a study of how leaders tell stories to make other people follow them. It’s based on personal encounters with a wide variety of leaders, from Bill Clinton and Angela Merkel to Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher, and even cultural leaders such as Dolly Parton.
Reviewers have been full of praise for Esler’s fiction and story-telling abilities. The writer Bernard Cornwell said his novels are "made luminous with wisdom, sympathy and story telling." The Guardian commented that Esler's fiction displays "undoubted sympathy for the human condition and a burning anger, a genuine lyricism, a quick sensitivity and a real understanding of other people." The Financial Times said Esler's stories of people in power and the compromises they are forced to make, shows that he "understands the political beast better than anyone."
Gavin EslerGavin Esler was born in Glasgow, and brought up in Edinburgh and Northern Ireland. His family are descended from German Protestant refugees who fled to safety in Scotland during the religious wars of the early 17th Century. He spent the first three years of his life living with his parents, grandmother and aunts in a three-bedroom council house in Clydebank. The family moved to Edinburgh and Gavin won a scholarship to George Heriot's School. He planned to study medicine at Edinburgh University and then, to the relief of patients everywhere, made an abrupt switch to English, American and, eventually, Irish literature. After he finished his post-graduate studies he was offered a job on The Scotsman in Edinburgh but turned it down as likely to be a bit dull, preferring instead The Belfast Telegraph. He moved on to the BBC in Belfast during some of the worst of "the Troubles," and got to know leaders of the IRA and other Republican and loyalist paramilitary groups. On one occasion the leader of a loyalist organisation introduced himself to Esler with the memorable words: “I am speaking to you as someone deeply involved in violence.” It turned out to be an accurate description.
His investigative work on the wrongful convictions of Giuseppe Conlon and his son Gerry led to a campaign which eventually overturned the convictions of the so-called “Guildford Four” and “Maguire Seven” -- innocent Irishmen and women convicted of bombing offences on the basis on non-existent or unreliable “evidence.” Their stories eventually became the basis of the film, In the Name of the Father.
Esler moved on to become the BBC's Chief North America Correspondent, based in Washington and covering the Bush and Clinton White House. He visited 48 of the 50 states but somehow missed out on Wisconsin and North Dakota. His first encounter with Bill Clinton in 1991 led him to believe that the then Governor of Arkansas might indeed become President of the United States some day - a belief somewhat dented when a Democratic party official described Clinton to Esler as “Oh, you mean Governor Zipper Problem.”
He then reported from countries as diverse as China, Peru, Argentina, Cuba, Brazil, Russia, Jordan, Iran, Saudia Arabia and from the Aleutian Islands, as well as all across Europe. He won a Royal Television Society award for a TV documentary about Alaska and a Sony Gold award for a BBC radio investigation into the case of Sami al Hajj, who was detained without charge in Guantanamo bay, but released shortly after the radio programme was broadcast.
Over the past two decades Gavin Esler has interviewed world leaders ranging from Mrs Thatcher, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, John Major, King Abdullah of Jordan and President Chirac to President Clinton, President Carter, Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega, Ed Miliband and Israel's Shimon Peres. In the arts and culture programmes he anchors for BBC World he has als
Reviewers have been full of praise for Esler’s fiction and story-telling abilities. The writer Bernard Cornwell said his novels are "made luminous with wisdom, sympathy and story telling." The Guardian commented that Esler's fiction displays "undoubted sympathy for the human condition and a burning anger, a genuine lyricism, a quick sensitivity and a real understanding of other people." The Financial Times said Esler's stories of people in power and the compromises they are forced to make, shows that he "understands the political beast better than anyone."
Gavin EslerGavin Esler was born in Glasgow, and brought up in Edinburgh and Northern Ireland. His family are descended from German Protestant refugees who fled to safety in Scotland during the religious wars of the early 17th Century. He spent the first three years of his life living with his parents, grandmother and aunts in a three-bedroom council house in Clydebank. The family moved to Edinburgh and Gavin won a scholarship to George Heriot's School. He planned to study medicine at Edinburgh University and then, to the relief of patients everywhere, made an abrupt switch to English, American and, eventually, Irish literature. After he finished his post-graduate studies he was offered a job on The Scotsman in Edinburgh but turned it down as likely to be a bit dull, preferring instead The Belfast Telegraph. He moved on to the BBC in Belfast during some of the worst of "the Troubles," and got to know leaders of the IRA and other Republican and loyalist paramilitary groups. On one occasion the leader of a loyalist organisation introduced himself to Esler with the memorable words: “I am speaking to you as someone deeply involved in violence.” It turned out to be an accurate description.
His investigative work on the wrongful convictions of Giuseppe Conlon and his son Gerry led to a campaign which eventually overturned the convictions of the so-called “Guildford Four” and “Maguire Seven” -- innocent Irishmen and women convicted of bombing offences on the basis on non-existent or unreliable “evidence.” Their stories eventually became the basis of the film, In the Name of the Father.
Esler moved on to become the BBC's Chief North America Correspondent, based in Washington and covering the Bush and Clinton White House. He visited 48 of the 50 states but somehow missed out on Wisconsin and North Dakota. His first encounter with Bill Clinton in 1991 led him to believe that the then Governor of Arkansas might indeed become President of the United States some day - a belief somewhat dented when a Democratic party official described Clinton to Esler as “Oh, you mean Governor Zipper Problem.”
He then reported from countries as diverse as China, Peru, Argentina, Cuba, Brazil, Russia, Jordan, Iran, Saudia Arabia and from the Aleutian Islands, as well as all across Europe. He won a Royal Television Society award for a TV documentary about Alaska and a Sony Gold award for a BBC radio investigation into the case of Sami al Hajj, who was detained without charge in Guantanamo bay, but released shortly after the radio programme was broadcast.
Over the past two decades Gavin Esler has interviewed world leaders ranging from Mrs Thatcher, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, John Major, King Abdullah of Jordan and President Chirac to President Clinton, President Carter, Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega, Ed Miliband and Israel's Shimon Peres. In the arts and culture programmes he anchors for BBC World he has als
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 12, 2014
For anyone reading this, please read the last paragraph for my personal opinions of the protagonist discussed here.
I received this book as an appreciation token for free with my The Economist magazine subscription. Apparently I took part in a survey and opted for print edition of this book. I wasn't really excited to read this because of a lack of interest into management and leadership guides, which I expected this one will deal with. However, this one is a pretty light, breezy read and Once I started reading few pages, I decided to give it a try.
And I was pleasantly surprised. What Gavin Ensler, the BBC correspondent with a career spanning over 30 years, has done here is impressive. In his journalist life, in both professional and personal capacity he has interviewed a gamut of political leaders and their aides, cultural icons, business tycoons and in 'Lessons From The Top' he tries to analyse the common threads, similar undercurrent of what successful leaders try to convey to us. As we find out, all of them, follow a similar strategy and often the stories of the leaders look eerily parallel to each other to such an extent that without specific knowledge, it would be hard to distinguish vital sections of one leader's autobiography from another's.
According to Ensler, Successful leadership stories tend to be three tiered. The first is the leader's 'personal story', which in most cases if not all, is a story of struggle and hardship, sometimes laden with youthful misadventures and finally a call to pursue his/her destiny. The second tier is the story of inclusion. Here, the leader tries to switch on a bulb - pun intended - to tap into something that has always, always resonated with people en masse. Again in most cases if not all, these tokens of tapping are universal. They are same from America to Armenia, from India to Island of Monte Negro. And those words are change, development, forward progress, inclusiveness, justice, national pride, hope. As we all know, these tokens are vague with little to no concrete explanation or metrics upon to measure. And of course, everyone wants their countries or states or local bodies to change to a more developed entity moving towards progress, everybody hand in hand, a just country where everyone is proud of their heritage and traditions. The third tier of leadership storytelling is very simple and that is how the leader's personal story fits into the larger second story and thus how the leader and the mass are part of a greater sphere of some umbrella.
For a review of this book, I decided to do something that I was pondering throughout my course of reading this and that is to try to see how Ensler's theory fits into India's recent national election. I picked up lessons from this book to dissect something that I have very keenly observed in this election and that is to weigh in our current Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi's rise into the helm of the world's largest democracy.
The first lesson of the book is absolutely simple and inexplicably crucial for any leader, cutting across any sphere, any geographical boundary and every perceivable lines of demarcation. That is, 'Who Am I' story of the leader. Successful leaders spend tons of energy, effort and time to define themselves. They devise phrases, or rather catch lines which will always resonate with the audience. Often aides of the leaders run gargantuan PR campaign to intensify the 'Who Am I' story of the leaders to such an extent that those catch lines become - what the author describes as 'earwigs' - inseparable from the leader.
Take this into our context. Mr. Modi, as we now all know, is a man of versatile qualities but few among them come to the foremost of his supposedly copious amount of admirable qualities. And I am trying to present the pre-election campaign of his party, BJP.
One is, Modi is a self-made man. Born in an India which has just come out of British colonialism, he rose to the top of his party all by himself. He is someone with sheer determination, profound aspiration and puts enormous effort to achieve them. He rose from the ranks of a simple, humble 'tea seller' in a railway station and now PM of the country. This particular phrase, 'tea seller' was so abundantly used in almost all public speeches and campaigns of Modi that soon, it became an 'earwig' in Indian polity and thus into his electorate. Everyone knew he was a tea seller who by all virtues of himself, stood tall and strong. This is a very powerful, inspirational story that was molded into so many layers and abstractions and rhetoric, by his PR persons that a lot of people will feel obliged to vote for him. After all, we all love a success story soaked in perspiration and a great number of Indians want themselves to see into that position.
Two - He is a man of mission. He is the no-nonsense guy of Indian politics. He handles his government in a manner that looks like a well oiled corporate machinery. He is a man of tough words and bold measures. What media and BJP PR team successfully did was to script the story of a 'vibrant Gujarat - a model of development' into the psyche of Indians. Now, comparisons will crop up with every other state and the story of development of Gujarat will be shown, the state with 24/7 electricity, excellent public infrastructure, miles and miles of highway and roads with no pot-holes or ditches (roads in most of India are really scary to describe and that is a fact). So, now everyone wants to be Gujarat. And what is the way forward to do that? Vote for Modi, of course. What he did in Gujarat will then be replicated throughout a country of 1.2 billion people, with so many differences, diversities among them that it can safely be considered as a mini-continent. And this development story became 'Modi model of development'. Another earwig. However, quite a handful of eminent economists and sociologists have questioned his model of development which scores quite lowly in 'Human development index'. But hey, we are not debating policies. Again something which Ensler has showed in his writings, that no one passionately analyzes and debates policies of their leaders in their leader's leadership story.
Three - He confidently ridiculed, even humiliated his opponents. Now, quite frankly, it is not like that that he had qualified opponents but even then, his closest rival was the scion of Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty, Rahul Gandhi. He is everything that Modi isn't. He was a pampered boy born into politics, studied in Ivy league universities, has never handled a government and honestly, is a laughing stock in Indian political discourse. However, the verbal accusations of BJP campaign were immense to bring down his and Congress' stature to rock bottom in independent India. The Congress party, which is a century old party, has obtained the lowest number of electoral seats in this election. Modi ridiculed Mr. Gandhi as 'Shezada' (Prince). He stormed every speech with resourceful banters about 'Shezada' and putting list of Congress misdeeds with emphasis of what he can offer in form of 'Gujarat model of development'. Soon, the word 'Shezada' became another earwig.
Now, in 'Lessons From The Top', the second ingredient of a successful leadership story is 'Who Are We'.
In Modi's vocabulary, we are 'Mitron' (friends), 'Bhaiyo aur Beheno' (Brothers and sisters), a bunch of folks brimming with aspiration who will conquer everything imaginable, given the right path and right choice. He often invoked few of his icons who are respected pan India, like Swami Vivekananda (a spiritual leader) and Sardar Patel (The Iron Man of India). Now, Modi as we have already seen is a no-nonsense guy who means business. Extend a bit and you might feel that he is the modern day Iron Man of India. His daily routine is rigorous but he manages to do Yoga in the morning, to keep his body, mind and spirit in right direction.
And In Modi's version or vision of Indians, we share the common thread of a larger nationalism, again pan India. I have heard and read that Modi is a 'Hindu nationalist leader' countless number of times but I haven't come across an interview or question or explanation from him or from anyone else that what precisely is Indian nationalism. And I am not joking, I can honestly use that knowledge myself.
Third lesson in Ensler's book and in his theory, the least important part of a leadership story is 'What is our common purpose'.
Here, policies and numbers and metrics are important but if a leader can manage wonders in the first two stories, the significance of the third recipe, diminishes quite a bit. In Modi's view, he and all of India share a common purpose to rise towards development, prosperity, progress, change, hope.
In our last government's pathetic report card, given a chance, he will do wonders or so was the campaign. Now, indeed our last government was a sham. There are countless papers and concrete data to show decline of India's GDP, increasing fiscal deficit, Industrial production, languishing governance with rampant scandals of large scale corruption, all presumably happening under the auspices of Dr. ManMohan Singh - harbinger of India's economic democracy in 1993-94 - who Modi deftly ridiculed as 'MaunMohan Singh' (an insult which roughly translates to a silent person who knew that corruptions are happening but didn't or couldn't say a word). Put this in contrast with Modi's businessman persona and you already have a winner.
And after writing so much about Modi, I may look like a supporter of him. That is the power of his words and storytelling. And I can only say that I am not a fan of him as a person, I never was. After reading this book, I feel amused that I could write so much about him if I put the person and his party's election campaign under the radar of what Gavin Ensler tells. Of course, what I have written here is a glossed over version of our Prime Minister's previous accomplishments and I cannot vouch for the factual correctness, but as Ensler has shown time after time, leader after leader, decade after decade, a good, well told leadership story can do wonders.
P.S. - I haven't proof read this. I plan to do that tomorrow.
I received this book as an appreciation token for free with my The Economist magazine subscription. Apparently I took part in a survey and opted for print edition of this book. I wasn't really excited to read this because of a lack of interest into management and leadership guides, which I expected this one will deal with. However, this one is a pretty light, breezy read and Once I started reading few pages, I decided to give it a try.
And I was pleasantly surprised. What Gavin Ensler, the BBC correspondent with a career spanning over 30 years, has done here is impressive. In his journalist life, in both professional and personal capacity he has interviewed a gamut of political leaders and their aides, cultural icons, business tycoons and in 'Lessons From The Top' he tries to analyse the common threads, similar undercurrent of what successful leaders try to convey to us. As we find out, all of them, follow a similar strategy and often the stories of the leaders look eerily parallel to each other to such an extent that without specific knowledge, it would be hard to distinguish vital sections of one leader's autobiography from another's.
According to Ensler, Successful leadership stories tend to be three tiered. The first is the leader's 'personal story', which in most cases if not all, is a story of struggle and hardship, sometimes laden with youthful misadventures and finally a call to pursue his/her destiny. The second tier is the story of inclusion. Here, the leader tries to switch on a bulb - pun intended - to tap into something that has always, always resonated with people en masse. Again in most cases if not all, these tokens of tapping are universal. They are same from America to Armenia, from India to Island of Monte Negro. And those words are change, development, forward progress, inclusiveness, justice, national pride, hope. As we all know, these tokens are vague with little to no concrete explanation or metrics upon to measure. And of course, everyone wants their countries or states or local bodies to change to a more developed entity moving towards progress, everybody hand in hand, a just country where everyone is proud of their heritage and traditions. The third tier of leadership storytelling is very simple and that is how the leader's personal story fits into the larger second story and thus how the leader and the mass are part of a greater sphere of some umbrella.
For a review of this book, I decided to do something that I was pondering throughout my course of reading this and that is to try to see how Ensler's theory fits into India's recent national election. I picked up lessons from this book to dissect something that I have very keenly observed in this election and that is to weigh in our current Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi's rise into the helm of the world's largest democracy.
The first lesson of the book is absolutely simple and inexplicably crucial for any leader, cutting across any sphere, any geographical boundary and every perceivable lines of demarcation. That is, 'Who Am I' story of the leader. Successful leaders spend tons of energy, effort and time to define themselves. They devise phrases, or rather catch lines which will always resonate with the audience. Often aides of the leaders run gargantuan PR campaign to intensify the 'Who Am I' story of the leaders to such an extent that those catch lines become - what the author describes as 'earwigs' - inseparable from the leader.
Take this into our context. Mr. Modi, as we now all know, is a man of versatile qualities but few among them come to the foremost of his supposedly copious amount of admirable qualities. And I am trying to present the pre-election campaign of his party, BJP.
One is, Modi is a self-made man. Born in an India which has just come out of British colonialism, he rose to the top of his party all by himself. He is someone with sheer determination, profound aspiration and puts enormous effort to achieve them. He rose from the ranks of a simple, humble 'tea seller' in a railway station and now PM of the country. This particular phrase, 'tea seller' was so abundantly used in almost all public speeches and campaigns of Modi that soon, it became an 'earwig' in Indian polity and thus into his electorate. Everyone knew he was a tea seller who by all virtues of himself, stood tall and strong. This is a very powerful, inspirational story that was molded into so many layers and abstractions and rhetoric, by his PR persons that a lot of people will feel obliged to vote for him. After all, we all love a success story soaked in perspiration and a great number of Indians want themselves to see into that position.
Two - He is a man of mission. He is the no-nonsense guy of Indian politics. He handles his government in a manner that looks like a well oiled corporate machinery. He is a man of tough words and bold measures. What media and BJP PR team successfully did was to script the story of a 'vibrant Gujarat - a model of development' into the psyche of Indians. Now, comparisons will crop up with every other state and the story of development of Gujarat will be shown, the state with 24/7 electricity, excellent public infrastructure, miles and miles of highway and roads with no pot-holes or ditches (roads in most of India are really scary to describe and that is a fact). So, now everyone wants to be Gujarat. And what is the way forward to do that? Vote for Modi, of course. What he did in Gujarat will then be replicated throughout a country of 1.2 billion people, with so many differences, diversities among them that it can safely be considered as a mini-continent. And this development story became 'Modi model of development'. Another earwig. However, quite a handful of eminent economists and sociologists have questioned his model of development which scores quite lowly in 'Human development index'. But hey, we are not debating policies. Again something which Ensler has showed in his writings, that no one passionately analyzes and debates policies of their leaders in their leader's leadership story.
Three - He confidently ridiculed, even humiliated his opponents. Now, quite frankly, it is not like that that he had qualified opponents but even then, his closest rival was the scion of Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty, Rahul Gandhi. He is everything that Modi isn't. He was a pampered boy born into politics, studied in Ivy league universities, has never handled a government and honestly, is a laughing stock in Indian political discourse. However, the verbal accusations of BJP campaign were immense to bring down his and Congress' stature to rock bottom in independent India. The Congress party, which is a century old party, has obtained the lowest number of electoral seats in this election. Modi ridiculed Mr. Gandhi as 'Shezada' (Prince). He stormed every speech with resourceful banters about 'Shezada' and putting list of Congress misdeeds with emphasis of what he can offer in form of 'Gujarat model of development'. Soon, the word 'Shezada' became another earwig.
Now, in 'Lessons From The Top', the second ingredient of a successful leadership story is 'Who Are We'.
In Modi's vocabulary, we are 'Mitron' (friends), 'Bhaiyo aur Beheno' (Brothers and sisters), a bunch of folks brimming with aspiration who will conquer everything imaginable, given the right path and right choice. He often invoked few of his icons who are respected pan India, like Swami Vivekananda (a spiritual leader) and Sardar Patel (The Iron Man of India). Now, Modi as we have already seen is a no-nonsense guy who means business. Extend a bit and you might feel that he is the modern day Iron Man of India. His daily routine is rigorous but he manages to do Yoga in the morning, to keep his body, mind and spirit in right direction.
And In Modi's version or vision of Indians, we share the common thread of a larger nationalism, again pan India. I have heard and read that Modi is a 'Hindu nationalist leader' countless number of times but I haven't come across an interview or question or explanation from him or from anyone else that what precisely is Indian nationalism. And I am not joking, I can honestly use that knowledge myself.
Third lesson in Ensler's book and in his theory, the least important part of a leadership story is 'What is our common purpose'.
Here, policies and numbers and metrics are important but if a leader can manage wonders in the first two stories, the significance of the third recipe, diminishes quite a bit. In Modi's view, he and all of India share a common purpose to rise towards development, prosperity, progress, change, hope.
In our last government's pathetic report card, given a chance, he will do wonders or so was the campaign. Now, indeed our last government was a sham. There are countless papers and concrete data to show decline of India's GDP, increasing fiscal deficit, Industrial production, languishing governance with rampant scandals of large scale corruption, all presumably happening under the auspices of Dr. ManMohan Singh - harbinger of India's economic democracy in 1993-94 - who Modi deftly ridiculed as 'MaunMohan Singh' (an insult which roughly translates to a silent person who knew that corruptions are happening but didn't or couldn't say a word). Put this in contrast with Modi's businessman persona and you already have a winner.
And after writing so much about Modi, I may look like a supporter of him. That is the power of his words and storytelling. And I can only say that I am not a fan of him as a person, I never was. After reading this book, I feel amused that I could write so much about him if I put the person and his party's election campaign under the radar of what Gavin Ensler tells. Of course, what I have written here is a glossed over version of our Prime Minister's previous accomplishments and I cannot vouch for the factual correctness, but as Ensler has shown time after time, leader after leader, decade after decade, a good, well told leadership story can do wonders.
P.S. - I haven't proof read this. I plan to do that tomorrow.
April 11, 2021
Great book with great examples. I particularly enjoyed the Bill Clinton impeachment where the PR team ran multiple stories on politicians.
April 2, 2016
Gordon Brown was a UK career politician full of the kind of talents which could take him to the top, but he did not have the story-telling talents necessary for the twenty-first century. In this sentence (p220) Esler captures the core message of this book: the importance of having a 'story' whose narrative describes 'Who am I?', 'Who are we?' and 'Where will me leadership take us?'. Esler claims that if you can't define who you are and what you stand for, you're not really a leader. (p215)
Esler's anecdotes drawn from his time as a journalist make for a readable book (with the exception of his excessive references to Christian mythology). However, they lack the rigorous analysis evident in other leadership books. The shallowness of Esler's analysis is emphasised by his repetition of the British myth that Churchill was 'the greatest leader' the British ever had. Churchill was an exceptional orator, but an appalling leader, and the use of this example by Esler highlights that many people often confuse the two. So while story-telling is important, spin is no substitute for substance.
And this could equally describe this book - quite readable, but limited substance.
Esler's anecdotes drawn from his time as a journalist make for a readable book (with the exception of his excessive references to Christian mythology). However, they lack the rigorous analysis evident in other leadership books. The shallowness of Esler's analysis is emphasised by his repetition of the British myth that Churchill was 'the greatest leader' the British ever had. Churchill was an exceptional orator, but an appalling leader, and the use of this example by Esler highlights that many people often confuse the two. So while story-telling is important, spin is no substitute for substance.
And this could equally describe this book - quite readable, but limited substance.
August 30, 2013
I gave up on this book after 4 chapters. It was pretty dull and pedestrian and was written in an almost patronising tone. I don't quite know who the book was aimed at, people who want to develop leadership characteristics or current affairs enthusiasts, but although there were some very good points, and I liked the way he gave a synopsis at the end of every chapter, it was all a bit obvious and flabby. I could have been condensed into an article/paper, not substantial enough for a book
July 3, 2014
This book is superb. I recommend it to anyone interested in politics, leadership, anecdotes or a combination of all three!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews