Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

The Five Temptations of a CEO is another of Patrick Lencioni’s fable-style business leadership books. This fable was about a troubled CEO who has a dream where mysterious figures (including a janitor) teach him how to be a better leader. Needless to say the fable portion of the book is mostly useless, and the lessons to be learned are just variations of those in his other books.

Here are the five temptations:

1. Protecting your career status. If your career is more important to you than the success of your company, your motivation is in the wrong place.
2. Wanting to be popular. This prevents the leader from giving honest and direct feedback to his team. As a result, no one is held accountable.
3. Unwilling to make decisions. If you’re very concerned about your reputation, you’ll avoid making decisions until you have the full information (which is never). No decision is a decision; it’s just always a bad one. Without a decision there is nothing to hold people accountable against.
4. Desire for harmony. You need productive conflict and opposing ideas. Otherwise you lose credibility as you surround yourself with yes-men.
5. Afraid to trust others. To get others to trust you, you have to trust them, and this means having some professional vulnerability.

This book is very short and has tons of extra whitespace, so it reads in about 15 minutes. Despite this, I found reading this to be a waste of time, since it’s the same material as all of Lencioni’s other books (though I think this one came first).

The main thing I learned that if you want to write business books, you don’t need new ideas, you can just repackage the same message several times. However, I’m not sure that’s what the author wanted me to learn. :-)