Inside the Leader's Mind: Five Ways to Think Like a Leader (Financial Times Series) [Paperback]

I have always believed that no one can be a true leader unless his/her leadership is from within, naturally or by nurturing. This is the only way a leader can wisely use the authority which comes with his/her responsibility to drive results and take accountability for the outcomes, good or bad.
In reading Inside the Leader's mind, I have been amazed by the way Liz Mellon has described the above in the section dealing with the five steps to move upwards. "How to climb a corporate ladder" has never been so easily explained.
The self assessment questions provided at the end of each step are found to be useful for those who aspire to be true leaders.
What makes the book even more interesting is the fact that it not based on theoretical statements but on facts and practical inputs from 20 world-class leaders who have made it happen.
Inside the Leader's Mind is both inspiring and provocative.
One cannot act as a leader if he/she does not think as a leader. It is how we think that determines how we act.

Bernard Katompa,
CEO, Liberty Africa

Liz Mellon walks with us among dozens of leaders, whether sharing their most public moments or abiding their most unguarded confidence to report her observations and present a behavioural prescription, not for success in itself, but for a sublime personal fulfilment that generates success.

Mellon, the respected academic--and one of the best professors of leadership I know--manages to write in the voice of a thoughtfully investigative journalist, as we are introduced to some of the most interesting organizational leaders in the world. Her keenly empathetic ear helps makes their examples accessible and helpful to leaders at all stages of development. Mellon reveals the sets of common behaviours that we can all study, understand and emulate.

Inside the Leader's Mind has an engaging cadence that carries us from planting mangroves in Malaysia with a CEO during his corporate training program to the cloistered boardroom blunders of the Deepwater Horizon debacle. Throughout the journey, we meet leaders who fail with bravado, relearn with aplomb and rise back with selfless humility.

Inside the Leader's Mind articulates a vital catalyst for excellence in a chaotic business environment: ambiguity. As Mellon describes her "Five Ways of Thinking Like a Leader," the reader is counselled to face realities of solitude and bruising public accountability and, at the same time, the reader is enticed by the narratives of those who navigate the perils to find immense joy as the leaders they set out to be.

Mellon informs the learning community, the psychological academy and all business executives who seek advancement in the highest echelons of global organizations with casually insightful scenarios from topical interviews both recent and revisited from her decades of leadership study.

We see that among globally diverse leaders, the commonality is the unknown. The deck has been reshuffled as powerful nations are digging out from collapse and emerging nations have never seen such golden opportunities.

Challenging the notions of leadership that were responsible for the world's greatest financial crisis of a century, Inside the Leader's Mind offers a new path that is as rewarding as it is courageous.

The good news is: nobody has enough information, so here's your chance for greatness.

Let me declare an interest. I picked up this title as a mild sceptic. My shelves are loaded with similar sounding offerings - many with their spines uncracked. I'm putting this one aside now, coffee-stained, having been able to spend some absorbing time with a succession of fascinating characters inhabiting a rarefied corporate stratosphere. In its compact pages I found both space and oxygen enough to breathe and, importantly, to reflect a little myself.

The central construct of the book is powerful - the way leaders think defines them and drives all their complex behaviours - when we see their hands working and their lips moving, we need to follow their mind's dance. The essential substance of the book is well covered in reviews here and it its various promotional blurbs elsewhere. For me, the five ways of thinking like a leader fit snugly and possibly deliberately into the compass of a single hand. There's the 'Solid Core' of self-belief and values that for me is the thumb capable of touching each of the other four digits as they perform a constant waggle dance of their own. The middle and forefingers of 'No Safety Net' and 'Comfortable in Discomfort' are the pivotal hinge of the piece, V-shaped and directional whichever way you see them. The ring finger of 'On My Watch' is the conscience of the whole, while 'I Am the Enterprise' with it overtone of egotism, has to occupy the pinkie spot rather than centre stage - all inside my mind that is.

Like all good reads in this field, 'Inside The Leader's Mind' sows its own crop of follow-up questions. Which of Mellon's thoughtfully crafted phrases will achieve 'stickiness'? Which is her 'Tipping Point', her 'Good to Great' or 'Emotional Intelligence' signature? How many of her twenty business leaders will have crashed and burned in a few years' time? Am I more or less inclined to cut my CEO some slack, to want to spend time empathising with her existential dilemmas as a result of reading this sympathetic distillation? This is where Mellon's own voice as relentless interviewer, as wise counsellor and as steely corporate consultant is important to lifting the book as a whole from beyond the airport shelves of instant 'how-to' travel guides. You can almost hear each of her twenty principal respondents puffing out their cheeks at the end of an interview and musing aloud, 'Hmm, that was interesting?' I suspect that each is a more thoughtful, reflective leader as a result - and that is a result.

Mellon's book can be bought in haste and on impulse and then read and digested at leisure - like a wine, if it is truly made it will get richer, fuller and more subtle over time. I simply enjoyed it in the moment - with coffee.