I purchased this book after receiving a series of promotional emails, and I had high expectations due to the level of name-dropping and implied endorsements. The book was promoted as giving a scientific brain-based explanation of leadership.
Unfortunately I found this was this is yet another pseudoscientific book on management and leadership offering over-simplified "magic bullet" six-step solutions, although one with an interesting spin, in that it uses neuroscientific research as a means of justifying and legitimizing the author's leadership development programs and products.
Pseudoscientists claim to base their theories on empirical evidence and take great pleasure in pointing out the consistency of their theories with past research and well-known facts.
More worrying is the fact that nowhere in the book, despite many extravagant claims, did I find any real experimental or solid research support for the notion that "Quiet Leadership" was in fact superior to other models of leadership or even effective.
Given that this book is purporting to promote a new "scientific" leadership model, to be taken seriously the reader would reasonably expect to have seen in-depth comparisons between "Quiet Leadership", and more established models of leadership, for example, Bass and Avilio's Transformational Leadership Model, which is one of the well-known and most researched models of leadership in the serious leadership literature.
Of course, getting people to think about their thinking patterns is a central part of all leadership models, we've known that for decades, so the idea of prompting insight "ahh" moments is nothing ground breaking as Rock claims. However, a leader also need to quite directive at times and Rock does not address the need for this flexibility. His approach is far too black and white for the real-world of business.
I'm not sure if I'm cynical or if others are being gullible, or if they are simply uninformed about both leadership and neuroscience - but none of this book seems to be "groundbreaking code-breaking" "thought-leadership" or the "road to self-actualisation", just another example of using management mumbo-jumbo with a "scientific" label to legitimize and sell "magic bullet" leadership development products.
It may be that in time (eventually) neuroscience may well in time move beyond functional analysis of neurological brain processes and offer meaningful insights into real-world leadership behaviors and organisational change, but this book does not, as claimed, give a solid brain-based explanation of leadership nor a solid theoretical basis for leadership coaching.
However, it does give some interesting versions of a range of CoachU and NLP meta-coaching tools, and this section will be useful information on common workplace coaching tools for novice coaches and consultants.
buyer beware the "BS"!!!
A management reader 5