Leadership on the Run: How to Get Better Results Faster

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

Leadership, according to Bendaly, is not management. It’s stepping out
of involvement in day-to-day activity in order to help the team focus on
the bigger goals, those important strategic directions that have the
potential to make a company great.

Bendaly has established a modest reputation as an authority on business
leadership. This is her ninth book on teams and team leadership. Her
theories are slowly becoming known through her consulting business,
workshops, and public-speaking activities.

The book promotes four broad-stroke strategies for successful
leadership: embracing compelling goals, feeding the team’s drive to
excel, good decision-making, and influencing others to support your
goals. Corporate culture, innovative thinking, stretch goals, pure
communication, uniqueness, energy syphons, trend tracking, meeting
agreements, commitment, and partnerships are all covered as
substrategies that support the big four. For those suffering from
burnout on sports comparisons, the approach of using astronaut Rick
Searfoss to provide the illustrative commentary running through the work
is a refreshing change.

Bendaly’s theories are strong, but their verbalization lacks power.
No dynamic catchphrases anchor the concepts or make them particularly
quotable. The flat style dooms the work to joining hundreds of other
management how-to books on the to-be-read-one-day shelf.