The Harvard Business Review Leader’s Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level
Ron Ashkenas and Brook Manville
Harvard Business Review Press (October 2018)

“Act as if what you do makes a difference. Because it does.” William James

The co-authors of this primer, Ron Ashkenas and Brook Manville, have decades of wide and deep experience in the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous field of leadership development. They share in this volume the valuable lessons they have learned. Of greater value to those who read this book is the fact that Askenas and Manville offer cutting-edge thinking rather than a rehash of received wisdom.

How leaders make an impact, inspire their organization, and get to the next level today is significantly different today from how they did that during the emergence of (let’s say) high impact technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI); sensors and the Internet of Things (IOT); autonomous machines — robots, cobots, drones, and self-driving vehicles; distributed leaders and blockchains; virtual, augmented, and mixed reality; connections of everything and everyone; and 5G networks and satellite constellations.

Heaven knows what awaits C-level executives in years to come.

Here is perhaps the greatest challenge that leaders now face, suggested by the title of one of Marshall Goldsmith’s most recent books: what got you and your organization here will not get you there. In fact, I presume to add, what got you here won’t even allow you to remain “here,” whatever and wherever that may be.

Ashkenas and Manville obviously agree with Albert Einstein’s admonition: “Make everything as simple as possible…but no simpler.” With meticulous precision, they focus on these leadership basics, devoting a separate chapter to each:

1. Build a unifying vision
2. Develop a strategy
3, Get great people on board
4. Focus on results
5. Innovate for the future
6. Lead yourself

Note: These are as good as any. There could be a covey of seven different ones of equal value. Thomas Edison makes this key point: “Vision without execution is hallucination.” Peter Drucker makes another: “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”

Ashkenas and Manville identify their WHAT and then devote almost all of their and their reader’s attention to explaining HOW. The WHY for each is presumably obvious. Although these are separate components, they are in fact [begin italics] interdependent [end italics]. Also, I am convinced that there are no vision, strategy, inclusion, execution, innovation, or self-management issues. There are only [begin italics] business [issues].

In the seventh (and last) chapter, Ron Ashkenas and Brook Manville observe, “In the end, leadership must be an act (to borrow from the motto of the United States) of [begin italics] e pluribus unum [end italics]: ‘out of many pieces, one overall’…As you lead your organization, you are — both implicitly and explicitly, — constructing a system of people that reflects you, your values, and your aspirations. Doing so allows you to make, in iconic leader Steve Jobs’s term, ‘a dent in the universe.’ Recognize that for all it’s worth and your leadership practice will become the best way for you to create your impact on the world.” Well said.

Also, in this context, I urge all leaders as well as those who aspire to become one to keep in mind this passage 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.”