Books on Leadership are omnipresent. They are present in the stalls of Annual City Book Fair, Railway Wheelers, Suave Airport Lounge, Coffee Boutique… where not? Now the general question may be that in a mashrooming market place of leadership books why you buy and read the book captioned “The Inspired Leader” written by Mr. Anil Sachdev?
What is the freshness of the book resulting us to get inspired to recommend for other to read?
I think the noticable point of the book is about the lucid style of story telling by Mr. Sachdev, who is immensely backed with his Corporate, Academic and Consulting experience throughout the ages.
The flow of the story covering the following nine chapters are meticulously glued,
1. The two biggest lies
2. The power of how we narrate stories of our lives
3. The discovery of gifts
4. The power of conscious learning
5. Developing the capacity to think
6. Building trusting relationships
7. The capacity to act
8. Purpose and values
9. Overcoming blocks – awakening the inner leader
The author audiciously used the latest of models to emphasize his points for creating leaders within all of us. We get inspired by reading the story of the timeless leaders. But important is to stay away from passivity and curate our own story for others to follow us as Leadership mantra. Actually leadership is a batton of relay race. We can not win the race by holding the batton exclusively. We have to pass it on to someone to take it forward and so on.
The author while writing the book used the referencing extensively thus strengthening the work with academic rigor. The use of examples from Indian mythology to western research findings helped in maintaining the balance.
Personally I am system oriented rather than personality oriented to understand the performance of any Institution. But it is also a fact that often a leader proved to be a game changer for the institution due to unique style of handling a particular situation. The caselets based on experiences of Indian and International personalites have definitely increased the value of the book and made it reader friendly. The intermittent presence of sketches narating the concepts and associated stories found to be helpful for introspection, concurrently keep the readers fatigue free.
The handy work running around 200 pages could be a great co-traveller when we are travelling solo for atleast 3-4 hours.
Finally, while corporate experiences are mentioned in numbers but the leaders are often required to operate in a particular social ecosystem, the bandwidth of which mostly are variables. I hope that in future work the author will cover the area.
Reviewed by Indranil Banerjee
