Essential: How Distributed Teams, Generative AI, and Global Shifts Are Creating a New Human-Powered Leadership
Christie Smith and Kelly Monahan
Wiley (January 2025)

Providing high-impact leadership in a world that is increasingly tense, uncertain, and polarized

Long ago in Future Shock, Alvin Toffler made this prediction: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” Keep that prediction in mind when considering the fact that organizations need high-impact leadership — what Christie Smith and Kelly Monahan characterize as “essential leadership” — at all levels and in all areas of the given enterprise. More specifically, leaders who

o Suspend self-interest
o Cultivate insatiable curiosity
o Create a workplace culture of excellence
o Meet the human requirements of the workforce
o Invest in learning and evolving together

That is the WHAT of essential leadership. Smith and Monahan explain the HOW. (The WHY is — or at least should be — self-evident.)

You would also be well-advised to keep in mind these insights from other sources . First, from Lao-tse’s Tao Te Ching:

“Learn from the people
Plan with the people
Begin with what they have
Build on what they know
Of the best leaders
When the task is accomplished
The people will remark
We have done it ourselves.”

Here are a few other observations that came to mind while I was working  my way through Smith and Monahan’s lively and eloquent narrative:

“Vision without execution is hallucination.”  Thomas Edison

“People won’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”  Theodore Roosevelt

“There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”  Peter Drucker

In the Introduction, Smith and Monahan observe

Pay special attention to the material within which these six “Figures” are strategically inserted:

1.1 Key shifting in management capabilities (Page 20)
2.2 Overview of when skills gap is expected to occur in organizations and the percent of roles at risk. (28)
3.1 The unique and complementary skills of humans and artificial intelligence (54)
6.1 The C-suite significantly underestimates how much employees are struggling with their well-being (98)
9.1 The essential flywheel model (139)

I also commend to your attention the final chapter in which Christie Smith and Kelly Monahanan review “The Essentials of Leadership”: HOW TO suspend self-interest, cultivate insatiable curiosity, and create a culture of excellence. They conclude with a reminder that the concept of the Essential Leadership  Flywheel (i.e. continuously driving and improving one’s own practices)  “presents us not just with a model for leadership, but with a strategy for putting people back at the heart of our work. This is more than an operational necessity; it is a moral imperative that places humanity itself at stake…Let us build not just companies, but communities of excellence that reflect our highest ideals and aspirations.  This is our call to action, for the sake of humanity  and the future we are all a part of shaping.”

* * *

Here are two suggestions while you are reading Essential: First, highlight key passages. Also,  perhaps in a notebook kept near-at-hand (e.g. Apica Premium C.D. Notebook A5), record your comments, questions, and action steps (preferably with deadlines). Pay special attention to aforementioned Figures and the comments that conclude each chapter.

These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will expedite frequent reviews of key material later.