[pb]Reboot: Leadersip and the Art of Growing Up, by Jerry Colonna, 2-3 stars.

[NancyJ]

I have very mixed feelings about this book. The author is a leadership coach who has led several companies himself, and he has suffered from mental health issues all his life. I believe this book is an offshoot from podcasts he has done, which I imagine were quite popular. He narrates the audio book, with a practiced dramatic voice which is very effective in small doses, but not for a whole book. The beginning of the book was quite exhilarating and refreshingly different from what I expected this book to be. But I quickly lost enthusiasm as I kept reading.

Strengths:
1. He includes interesting examples that you might not see in other leadership books. This book is best when he tells stories about real people (with names disguised). Most leadership books don't deal with psychological issues. They like to pretend that leaders don't experience mental disturbance, even though millions of employees know that's not the case.

2. Coaching questions. He calls these invitations. He advocates deep reflection and the questions help in this process. These are also available on a pdf and on his website. Sometimes one really good question can enable a person to make a real breakthrough - emotional or practical. Many of his clients are dealing with a common need to find a clear purpose in life - especially when their product or business model is becoming obsolete. The questions can help with that.

3. Buddism ideas. These were interesting to me at first, but I don't know enough to know whether he was true to the religion, or if he combined ideas from other traditions.

Weaknesses
1. He doesn't have enough good stories to fill the book. So he throws in a lot of spiritual, psychological and philosophical goobledegoop.

2. His qualifications are sketchy. His training seems to be primarily in Buddism, but he also uses terms from Freudian psychoanalysis, and he throws in what he learned from the rock god near the Grand Canyon. This last experience might have been fueled by mushrooms.

3. Ethical problems. He bills himself as a coach, but he crosses many lines for someone in that field. He acts like he's doing psychoanalysis - which is unethical for a coach without psychological training. It's also outdated. He seems to think that every emotional or psychological weakness is a result of childhood trauma, when a psych 101 student could tell you otherwise.

Much of his advice to others seems to be heavily biased by his own breakdowns and experiences (granted, everyone is guilty of this at times). I wonder how different his life (and this book) might have been if someone handed him a book about Adult Children of Alcoholics, or a prescription for an antidepressant when he was younger.

It took me two weeks to read this book, because I just couldn't take the overly-dramatic half-whisper audio narration. He was trying to sound profound, but the term snake-oil salesmen came to me at one point.