Product Description

Improving human performance involves one of the hardest challenges in the known universe: changing the way people think. In constant demand as a coach, speaker, and consultant to companies around the world, David Rock has proven the secret to leading people (and living and working with them) is found in the space between our ears. "If people are being paid to think," he writes, "isn't it time the business world found out what the thing doing the work, the brain, is all about?"Supported by the latest groundbreaking research, "Quiet Leadership" provides, for the first time, a brain-based approach that will help busy leaders, executives, and managers improve their own and their colleagues' performance. Quiet leaders are masters at bringing out the best performance in others. They improve the thinking of people around them - literally improving the way their brains process information - without telling anyone what to do. Given how many people in today's companies are being paid to think and analyse, improving our thinking is one of the fastest ways to improve performance. This book offers a practical, six-step guide to making permanent workplace performance change by unleashing higher productivity, new levels of morale, and greater job satisfaction.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #37409 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Customer Reviews

Pseudoscientific Management Mumbo-Jumbo
I purchased this book after receiving a series of promotional emails, and I had high expectations due to the level of name-dropping and implied endorsements. The book was promoted as giving a scientific brain-based explanation of leadership.

Unfortunately I found this was this is yet another pseudoscientific book on management and leadership offering over-simplified "magic bullet" six-step solutions, although one with an interesting spin, in that it uses neuroscientific research as a means of justifying and legitimizing the author's leadership development programs and products.

Pseudoscientists claim to base their theories on empirical evidence and take great pleasure in pointing out the consistency of their theories with past research and well-known facts.

More worrying is the fact that nowhere in the book, despite many extravagant claims, did I find any real experimental or solid research support for the notion that "Quiet Leadership" was in fact superior to other models of leadership or even effective.

Given that this book is purporting to promote a new "scientific" leadership model, to be taken seriously the reader would reasonably expect to have seen in-depth comparisons between "Quiet Leadership", and more established models of leadership, for example, Bass and Avilio's Transformational Leadership Model, which is one of the well-known and most researched models of leadership in the serious leadership literature.

Of course, getting people to think about their thinking patterns is a central part of all leadership models, we've known that for decades, so the idea of prompting insight "ahh" moments is nothing ground breaking as Rock claims. However, a leader also need to quite directive at times and Rock does not address the need for this flexibility. His approach is far too black and white for the real-world of business.

I'm not sure if I'm cynical or if others are being gullible, or if they are simply uninformed about both leadership and neuroscience - but none of this book seems to be "groundbreaking code-breaking" "thought-leadership" or the "road to self-actualisation", just another example of using management mumbo-jumbo with a "scientific" label to legitimize and sell "magic bullet" leadership development products.

It may be that in time (eventually) neuroscience may well in time move beyond functional analysis of neurological brain processes and offer meaningful insights into real-world leadership behaviors and organisational change, but this book does not, as claimed, give a solid brain-based explanation of leadership nor a solid theoretical basis for leadership coaching.

However, it does give some interesting versions of a range of CoachU and NLP meta-coaching tools, and this section will be useful information on common workplace coaching tools for novice coaches and consultants.

buyer beware the "BS"!!!

A management reader 5

mundane
Rather mundane book on coaching - confusing to read. Looks like a lot of Coach U's and NLP ideas repackaged.