Book Review: The Source of Leadership by David M. Traversi
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How this book is different
This is not a scientific treatise or a study of effective management. It's more like a travelogue of one person's discovery of interesting places and practices in the leadership landscape.
Strengths
Eclectic. There are lots here that you won't get from the standard leadership book.
Personal. This is a collection of things that have worked for one person. They may work for you.
Warnings
Personal. This is a collection of things that have worked for one person. They may not work for you.
New Age jargon may put you off.
The research is skimpy. If you want research support this is not the book for you.
The overall system is shaky. If you're looking for tightly connected reasoning, this is not the book for you.
Bottom Line
Any one of the many techniques Traversi introduces you to can have a big impact.
Here are the details.
Unlike most books, this one really begins with the Acknowledgements. There, the author tells you:
"I am a strong believer in the oneness of our existence, that we are all connected to each other and every other element in our existence by a single energy. Nothing occurs in isolation."
This is not John Donne and "no man is an island." It's more like what would happen if Shirley MacLaine co-authored a business book. There are some real insights, but there is also some serious weirdness. Consider Traversi's definition of leadership, taken from the Introduction.
"Leadership is the process of transforming deep personal energies—internal drivers—into extraordinary interpersonal results. The person who recognizes, assesses, and develops those drivers will first be wholly empowered and fulfilled on the personal level and then, and only then, profoundly effective as a leader of people in today's high velocity, highly complex, and interconnected world."
If that appeals to you read on. I'll tell you what the book is about and how it may be a book you should read. Otherwise, move on to something else.
Still with me? OK. Here's the outline.
In the Introduction, titled "I went Searching," David Traversi tells us that "On average, I believe leaders misfire on most cylinders and achieve effectiveness of less than 50 percent."
This would be a more powerful statement if he gave us the vaguest hint of how that measurement was derived. We don't know what either 100 percent looks like or what 0 looks like. We don't know how he came up with his judgment.
This is also where Traversi introduces his "Leadership Dashboard." Like his statement about effectiveness, the Dashboard would be more helpful to you if you knew how to rate yourself or your peers on each dimension.
The next eight chapters lay out the drivers. Here are the drivers, in order of appearance.
Presence
Openness
Clarity
Intention
Personal Responsibility
Intuition
Creativity
Connected Communication
In each chapter you'll find a bit of New Age jargon, unsupported statements, and interesting ideas. It's the interesting ideas that make this book valuable.
There are lots of exercises in here. You're certain to find something that appeals to you and something you haven't tried before. If you pick up one new practice or new way of considering your leadership role, the book will pay for itself many times over.
Finally, comes the chapter on "Becoming a High Impact Leader." This is where it's all supposed to come together.
After 200 pages of working with the Dashboard, Traversi finally comes up with a measurement/assessment system with his "Source of Leadership Assessment Survey." It's not real clear how all of it works, but it doesn't matter.
Years ago, a grizzled Army Master Sergeant introduced me to meditation. That experience taught me that powerful tools can be found in unexpected places. The Source of Leadership is one of those places.
Dip into The Source of Leadership to find things to try. Some won't make sense. Some won't work. But others can transform your work and give you an edge.
The author has a blog supporting this book: The Source of Leadership Blog.
Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.
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Wally Bock has helped people learn to be great bosses for more than a quarter century. His latest book, Performance Talk: The One-on-One Part of Leadership, makes learning key leadership principles almost effortless by teaching through a story and providing lists of resources for further growth.
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While this book contains many good ideas about how effective leaders actually lead, there are some areas where the statements degenerate into the silly and ridiculous.
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This book is a mess. It seems the author is trying to make a buck by joining New Age ideas with business and fails. He contradicts himself at every idea. He writes of the importance of being "present" then speaks of envisioning the future. My favorite chapter was on being "open." He recommends doing something that could get you arrested for no apparent reason. The author shows his hubris by stating is book is "revolutionary,' but it's anything but. Actually, Napoleon Hill did it better. Read this book for laughs only.
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The tone of this book grated on me quite a bit. It has a very judgmental “this is the only way” to manage air that I found annoying and offensive. The author gives no research, or even explanations for his conclusions, except to state he has read a lot of leadership books, so have a lot of people. That does not make them authorities, but that is enough for this author. The story examples he gives are pretty nutty and not very believable, or helpful either. You can get the Dashboard he gives from any self-help book on the market now and most of them do a better job. The author seems to have read a lot of those books too. I thought this book was a waste of my time.
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I had the misfortune of being in Traversi’s workshop a few years ago and was curious about his book. His book is as bad as the workshop was. The worse part of the workshop was the worse part of the book, insincerity. If a seller is going to sell a product, the seller has to at least believe in it. This is where the author fails greatly. Traversi writes what he thinks the market wants, but definitely not what he believes or practices from what I experienced. Everyone is watching Oprah and reading self-help books, so he is going to sell you that. During the workshop, he came off as ill prepared and sophomoric. He spent most of the workshop boring us with flip charts and name-dropping. I wish one of his “friends” had put on the workshop and written this book, because both would have been better done. I think the value in the book is reading it to know what not to do when writing a book and it is a great example of how a follower writes a book about leadership.
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Thanks for stopping by and sharing your experience, Bill.
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