Customer Reviews

The Tao of Motivation: Inspire Yourself and Others

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"You have the key to motivate yourself and others" the opening of 'The Tao of Motivation' by Max Landsberg. The book is one of three in a series about leadership and management. The others are The Tao of Coaching and The Tools of Leadership.

The book is presented as a guide and uses the story of Alex and his struggle to become a board member to illustrate the theory behind motivation. (Alex is also the name of the manager in The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, coincidence?)

The book follows the learning process of Alex, the theory builds on previous chapters and the VICTORY-circle (Vision, Impetus, Confidence, Taking the Plunge, Outcomes, Responding to feedback, and of course 'You'). As in all things when working with people, just telling isn't enough: Show, don't tell. In order to be able to motivate others you must first learn how motivation works and how to motivate yourself. A number of subjects around motivation (psychology, NLP, Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator, body-language etc.) are briefly mentioned in the book. A reference list encourages you to further exploring.

I must say the book had an influence on me because I learned some new things about motivation. Because you want to read the life story of Alex you easily pick up the theory in between (don't skip it!). These kind of business novels are a nice way of learning new things.

One of three short books by Landsberg on key skills for leaders and managers. The others are The Tao of Coaching and The Tools of Leadership. All three are notable for their directness and brevity and all provide an extremely useful guide to important skills. Each is written around a brief story about 'Alex', on his journey from manager to CEO, with each episode designed to illustrate some aspect of the coaching/motivation/leadership challenge. Each episode is followed by a two page summary of the particular skill needed to meet the challenge. Each book has a useful bibliography to guide the reader to more detail where desired and a suite of Appendices covering further details on key aspects of skill.
There is naturally some overlap between the books, but each is valuable in its own right and the set combine to provide a thoughtful, practical and readily referenced guide to the key elements in the human side of management and leadership.
The Tao of Motivation is structured around the memnonic VICTORY, standing for Vision, Impetus, Confidence, Taking the Plunge, Outcomes, responding to feedback, and the particular 'You' with whom motivation is concerned. It also introduces aspects of basic psychology and tools such as MBTI and NLP in summary form ,

I really enjoyed the TAO of Coaching but this book is not in the same league, by far. I kind of have an idea what this book is about, but I'm not sure, sorry, just didn't get out of it what i expected.....

Personally I did find this one book on motivation to be less powerful as his other two books.

Although his other two books cover various models, this book focuses on only one model which he calls the VICTORY cycle (Vision, Impetus, Confidence, Taking the plunge, Observing outcomes, Responding to feedback, 'You'), explaining each phase step by step.

The book and model is pretty much OK. Still on motivational leadership (or self motivation) there are other works out there. It should not stop you though to read this book together with "The Tools of Leadership" and "The Tao of Coaching", especially as the 3 books together give a nice introduction on leadership, coaching and motivation.

The delibery service was OK considering that is an international delibery, the boock condition just fine, good deal.