Customer Reviews

A Passion to Lead: Seven Leadership Secrets for Success in Business, Sports, and Life

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Summary: Calhoun's A Passion to Lead draws practical leadership lessons from the basketball court and applies these to everyday life. Relying heavily on his experiences as a coach and the experiences of his players, Calhoun preaches the value of ambition and the virtue of hard-work. His book is roughly organized around seven broad leadership principles, such as the need for high standards, discipline, contingency plans, and tough mindedness in order to achieve success. To support these principles, Calhoun marshals a seemingly endless series of basketball anecdotes, each summarized with the rhetorical flare of a halftime pep talk. In this way, Calhoun exhibits at least as much passion for basketball as he does for leadership. The book concludes, strangely enough, with an informal catalogue of the author's accomplishments followed by a string of stirring exhortations, the whole of which reduces simply to the idea, "I did it, so can you!"

Assessment: Despite its aspirations, A Passion to Lead fails to contribute much original or meaningful thought to the ongoing leadership discussion in our culture. The work suffers from loose organization on major and minor levels. The reader finds himself adrift in each chapter, without the aid of logical thought progressions between sections. Moreover, the sheer volume of basketball related material in the book detracts from its primary purpose: namely, to elucidate leadership principles for life. The principles that do emerge often come across as cliché or coach-speak. This all would lead a cynic to conclude the book was composed hastily in order to capitalize on the name recognition of its author and laud his success in coaching (not to contributing insight on leadership). While A Passion to Lead proves an entertaining read for the college basketball enthusiast or the University of Connecticut devotee, for the thoughtful leader it amounts to a waste of precious time.

A very good book if you enjoy anothers outlook to what it takes to be a leader. Well written.

I love college basketball, so this book was decent to read. I underlined a lot of information in the first few chapters, but towards the end I barely made any marks in the book. Too much information was repeated over and over again.

Did you know that UConn lead the nation in shot blocking the last six years (an AMAZING ACCOMPLISHMENT)? If you didn't, its noted about 15 times in the book along with how Hilton Armstrong and Meka developed, did you know there was a small scandal invovling Mr. Price and Williams. These and many more things kept getting repeated and it brought down the quality of the book.

I didn't care for when the author made a transition from basketball to the "real world." I know coach Calhoun only knows about basketball since he's been in it for 35 years, but the one paragraph trying to relate basketball to the real life could have been better developed.

UConn is off to a great start this year - good luck

I am about 3/4 done with the book and I do agree it is a good book so far with good strategies, but as a student of a MAC school and a Chicago Bulls fan I know Bradley, Xavier, nor SIU are in the MAC and (within a page) it's Joakim Noah, not Yoakim Noah. But still a good book so far.

a quick read with some decent leadership points. i was very disappointed the Laptop scandal and the Quinnipiac coaching change was not discussed.

Nothing quite like a leadership book from one of the shadiest coaches in D1 bball. I wonder if he'll explain how to pay fraudulent AAU programs and then magically receive commitments from 5 star recruits, how to allow players back on a team after stealing laptops, and also how to strong arm his way out of playing Holy Cross in the Coaches vs Cancer Classic. I guess he's capable of writing a book on leadership as long as topics include How to Cheat without Getting Caught and Who needs ethics anyways?