In this stunning follow-up to his best-selling book, The Five Temptations of a CEO, Patrick Lencioni offers up another leadership fable that's every bit as compelling and illuminating as its predecessor. This time, Lencioni's focus is on a leader's crucial role in building a healthy organization--an often overlooked but essential element of business life that is the linchpin of sustained success. Readers are treated to a story of corporate intrigue as the frustrated head of one consulting firm faces a leadership challenge so great that it threatens to topple his company, his career, and everything he holds true about leadership itself. In the story's telling, Lencioni helps his readers understand the disarming simplicity and power of creating organizational health, and reveals four key disciplines that they can follow to achieve it.
Allegories and parables have long been effective ways to impart serious bits of knowledge and wisdom without getting too pedantic, and business readers seem increasingly receptive to sensible management theory that employs this lively age-old literary technique. Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, a "leadership fable" by Patrick Lencioni, continues the trend with a solid prescription for organizational health--aiming for less politics, lower turnover, more productivity, and higher morale. Presented as a fictional tale of two technical consultants and their competing companies, the story is structured in a fashion that recalls his previous book (The Five Temptations of a CEO, whose main character and firm are even slipped into this narrative). Lencioni uses this hypothetical setting to show how his concepts might look and work in the real world. In this case, his "four disciplines at the heart of making any organization world class" are revealed and explained through the philosophy and behavior of Rich O'Connor of Telegraph Partners. Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team, create organizational clarity, communicate organizational clarity, and reinforce organizational clarity through human systems. Through his tale of Telegraph and its rival Greenwich Consulting, Lencioni illustrates how these principles can be beneficially employed--and how an organization can be stymied when they're missing. The story moves quickly and is followed by a comprehensive analytical summary, which includes self-assessment tools and suggestions for putting the ideas into practice. --Howard Rothman
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
An Amazing Series of Insights - Must Read:
One of the series of leadership fables, Patrick Lencioni did not disappoint with this fable. As with The Five Temptations of a CEO: A Leadership Fable and Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business, just to name a few, Patrick Lencioni weaves an intrigue into a management lesson. Chapter by chapter you read to enjoy the story and never realize what business lessons are being planted into your mind for future reference. It takes great talent to do this, not... more info
An engaging story with concrete, memorable examples:
I've previously read Death By Meeting by Patrick Lencioni. I really connect with his ability to tell an engaging story which communicates the point. He then spends the last third of this book describing the four principals and how to put them into practice within the organization. The four disciplines of a healthy organization are: 1. Build and Maintain a Cohesive Leadership Team
2. Create Organizational Clarity
3. Over-Communicate Organizational Clarity
4. Reinforce... more info
Interesting View of a "Healthy Organization":
Patrick Lencioni, utilizing his engaging fable-as-lesson writing style, covers his view of the four "Disciplines" of a healthy organization in "The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive." The fable...and the "Model" underlying the fable...stresses the importance of clarity in a healthy organization. As in a number of Lencioni's other books, the simplicity of the framework covered in this book is stressed...as is the difficulty in actually implementing the framework. I found this book a... more info
Did the extraordinary executive get it wrong?:
Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive is Patrick Lencioni's second book written in 2000, again it is a fiction as well as a management book. The readers would be eager to know the obsessions of that very successful person. CEO is supposed to be rational and sensible. It is curious to note that such a person could be obsessed with anything. In fact, on very important issues, we had better be obsessed rather than let them off the hook lightly. The story looks like a novel involving commercial spies.... more info
