Courage: The Backbone of Leadership

In Courage, Gus Lee captures the essential component of leadership in measurable behaviors. Using actual stories from Whirlpool, Kaiser Permanente, IntegWare, WorldCom and other organizations, Lee shows how highly successful executives face and overcome their fears to develop moral intelligence. These real-world examples offer practical lessons for rooting out unethical practices and behaviors by Assessing them for rightness and integrity Addressing moral failures Following through with dialogue and direct action

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1 Part One: Backbone at the Point of Decision 9 1. Chris’s Story 11 2. Seeking Courageous Core Values 19 3. Going Deeper (and Higher) into Values and Ethics 31 4. Chris Boldly Moves Forward 43 5. Coda: Applying Courageous Values at Whirlpool 57 Part Two: Courage in Action 63 6. Courageous Communication 65 7. The Courageous Communication Model 75 8. Courageous Feedback 89 9. Courage by Example 105 10. Courageous Leadership 113 11. Three Acts of Courageous Leadership 125 12. Courageous Problem Solving: The Black Box 145 13. Using Courageous Communication from the Bottom Up 161 Part Three: Growing Your Courage 173 14. Everyday Habits That Build Courage 175 15. Your Character Quotient 185 16. The Courage to Change 199 Notes 205 Acknowledgments 211 The Authors 213 Index 215

About the Author :
Gus Lee is the best-selling author of China Boy and a nationally recognized expert on leadership and ethics. He is also adjunct staff at the Center for Creative Leadership and the U.S. Department of Justice. Lee lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Diane Elliott-Lee is a distinguished and award-winning clinical nurse specialist. She has helped edit Gus's five previous books and provided the guidance, inspiration, and structure for this book.

Review :
In this guide to doing the right thing, Lee presents a self-help approach to solving hard-edged problems. The key to effective leadership, he argues, is "principled conduct under pressure"—in short, courage. While courage is hardly the one-size-fits-all magic bullet that Lee envisions, much of his advice is valuable, particularly that dealing with communication, the thorniest management issue of all. The book is built around extended anecdotes about executives facing tough personnel decisions and having to confront their habits of "avoidant communication," and Lee's reconstructed dialogue is engaging, realistic and instructive. He also offers periodic references to his own, genuinely inspiring transition from myopic, alienated wimp to successful executive, lawyer, executive coach, consultant and bestselling novelist (China Boy, etc.). Granted, this business book has many of the problems typical of the genre: the constant invoking of the book's title, whether or not relevant to the point being made; the regular introduction of acronymed concepts and clumsy coinages; the inspirational speeches and the occasional royal we phrasing ("We now see the difference between high, medium and low core values"). But any book that offers a road map to handling unpleasant workplace conversations is welcome—even if the choices in your everyday life don't require as much courage as in Lee's scenarios. (Feb.) (Publishers Weekly, December 12, 2005)