The Serving Leader: Five Powerful Actions that Will Transform Your Team, Your Business, and Your Community [Paperback]

Ken Jennings (Author), John Stahl-Wert (Author), Ken Blanchard (Foreword)

Book Description

Series: Blanchard, Ken | Publication Date: October 10, 2004

Mike Wilson is a respected consultant charged with the task of building a new practice area in leadership development. During the new project, he learns that his father is very ill and wants his only child to come home and help him with "a few projects." Mike's father is a well-known, retired CEO, and Mike gets his boss's blessing to take as much time as he needs. Unbeknownst to him, Mike's father and boss, longtime friends, have plotted this visit to help Mike learn some needed leadership and life lessons. So begins this compelling narrative that combines a very human story with the classical Greenleaf theory of servant leadership. The second book in the acclaimed Ken Blanchard series (called "powerful testimony" by Brad Orr, CEO of John Burnham & Co) is both a practical guide for effective leadership and a book about the personal journey of growth that real leadership requires.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Ken Jennings John Stahl-Wert

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Mike Wilson is a respected partner on a career fast track at a prestigious, Boston-based consulting firm. He has just been charged with the task of building a new practice area in leadership development. With a small team he has begun to research the best practices in the field. He is a man in a hurry. One evening, soon into his new project, Mike receives a call from his mother in Philadelphia. She has bad news. His father is ill, and it’s serious. He wants his only child to come home and help him out "with a few projects."

Mike’s father, Robert Taylor Wilson, is a well-known, retired CEO who has gotten involved in leadership initiatives in his hometown of Philadelphia. Mike doesn’t really know much about his dad’s post-retirement "projects," but figures that the request can’t be that big a deal. An old man and his hobbies, right? In any event, it’s his dad, not the projects, that draws him back home.

Charlie Adams, Mike’s boss and the managing partner of the firm, encouraged him to take as much time as he needed to go home and help his dad. Unbeknownst to Mike, his boss and his father were good friends and had talked all of this over beforehand. "Plotted" might be more to the point. They had a mutual objective that Mike would learn some needed leadership and life lessons. The unusual team working with the senior Wilson had agreed to coach the younger man. Charlie had also suggested that, "for the sake of the firm," he keep a journal of his observations and reflections concerning the leadership approaches used in Philadelphia. To our great fortune, Mike did just that, providing through his journal a wonderful and personal account of everything he experienced and learned.

As it turns out, Mike’s dad had not exactly "retired." He and his cohort of friends were carrying out significant projects in their businesses, volunteer organizations, churches, and civic groups. Their initiatives were proving to be remarkably effective. The way they went about getting the job done, however, was anything but orthodox.

It didn’t take long for Mike to figure out that these unorthodox practices were no accident. The group had been intentionally developing and testing these new approaches over several years. What they were doing and learning is the basis of the Serving Leader approach described in the book.

The Serving Leader advances our understanding of Servant Leadership, bringing together classical Greenleaf theory with more recent research and practice in this growing field of inquiry. Taking an action orientation, this book focuses on practical actions that real people are already demonstrating, rather than on theory or ideas.

The Serving Leader is both a practical guide to the tools and techniques of effective leadership and, perhaps more importantly, a book about the personal journey of growth that real leadership requires. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 180 pages
• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers; 1st edition (October 10, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1576753085
• ISBN-13: 978-1576753088
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #72,646 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Call To Action, October 10, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Serving Leader: 5 Powerful Actions That Will Transform Your Team, Your Business, and Your Community (Ken Blanchard (Hardcover)) (Hardcover)

In The Serving Leader, Jennings and Stahl-Wert strike a deep chord of resonance for readers who are quietly serving and leading in the trenches of public, private, and non-profit sectors. There's an instrinsic rallying call in this book to these persons to embrace their destinies as serving leaders, to seek out and team up with like-minded souls in their networks, and then to get on with the work of great purpose to which they are committed. A good read with potentially life-changing ramifications.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Creating Leadership Traits & Standards for the Millennium, January 13, 2004

By 

"meka4u2c" (Cambridge, maryland United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Serving Leader: 5 Powerful Actions That Will Transform Your Team, Your Business, and Your Community (Ken Blanchard (Hardcover)) (Hardcover)

Reviewer: WC Emeka Obiozor....Journalist/Author/Special Educator

Ken Jennings and John Stahl-Wert's Serving Leader is an amazing and unique testimony of powerful actions and skills every person in a leadership position desires to acquire and utilize in transforming his team; be it business enterprise or non-profit community organization.
The book presented valuable leadership traits and standards using heart-warming tales of an estranged son, his dying father and unique landmarks of innovative leaders in different businesses and community-oriented organizations to illustrate the dynamic five principles of a serving leader.
The authors painstakingly gave us insights into different environments - offices, schools, homes, industries, and other work areas where authentic leaders chosen by followers are in charge principally to build the team, the business, and the community. Thus, a teachable and learnable instrument is offered that provides practical sense for what leadership and service principles for teams and organizations are based upon.
Having come from two distinctive backgrounds, the authors utilized their professional skills in leadership coaching and community building to promote the uplifting of the value of people in organizations and achieving organizational success.
Jennings is the founder and managing partner of Venture Works - engages in the areas of leadership development, strategy, and the management of change. Stahl-Wert presides over the Pittsburgh Leadership Foundation (PLF), a 25-year old faith-based intermediary organization in Pittsburgh-Pennsylvania, which specializes in bringing together leaders from the business, government, and social sectors to address human problems.
Distinctive information from the Serving Leader deals with the dreams and aspirations of most contemporary leaders to make their organizations work better. The authors packaged this book to provide today's servant leadership experiential opportunities "to see communities restored, lives improving, kids learning to read, prostitutes breaking the drug and economic chains that hold them, neighborhoods gaining local jobs."
I admired greatly the paradoxes of effective leadership displayed in the book, especially, how the authors blended passages from the Holy Scriptures to drive home important points and facts.
There were significant spotlights the book discussed in the process of pursuing the ideals of innovative leadership, such as - creating a working rapport among staff and management, coaching and mentoring activities that focus on staff strengths and address weaknesses, as well as mending fences and making up in a relationship. Highlights on father's role in giving and sharing love, directing, redirecting and influencing the lives of his child; enforcing school rules - belief in student's capacity for strength and determination, and getting them to rise up to expectations; was another unique aspect of this book.
As the authors would say, "They have to stay on the wire to succeed...because life is a high-wire act." This is very true.
Business executives, school administrators, policy makers, public and private sector, non-profit and community organizations would find this book useful.
It's definitely a good guide to addressing the weaknesses and strengths of leadership, exploring what leaders actually do in their organizations or are expected to do to support individual teams and run successful organizations.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars They understand what they're talking about, April 4, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Serving Leader: 5 Powerful Actions That Will Transform Your Team, Your Business, and Your Community (Ken Blanchard (Hardcover)) (Hardcover)

The book reads beautifully, and the story moved me to tears. What I most appreciate is the fact that Dr. Jennings and Dr. Stahl-Wert are practitioners of what they preach. This book rings true from start to finish. These men know what they're talking about. I'm working to become more of the kind of serving leader in my work and at home this book so clearly teaches. They're working at it, too. All of this is very encouraging!