The Backbone of Leadership by Gus Lee Essay

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Gus Lee’s Courage

In Gus Lee’s Courage: the Backbone of Leadership, several stories are told of leaders in real world settings—WorldCom, Whirlpool, IntegWare, and so on—to show how actual leaders face challenges with moral intelligence and the courage needed to apply solutions and cop to failures with honesty and integrity. The aim of the book is not so much as to show what works and what does not but rather to provide an exploratory experience for readers so that they can put themselves in real-life leaders’ shoes, see and feel what it is like to be in the situation at the moment, and better understand how it all turns out in the end. Lee notes that a River of Fear runs between the shores of safety on one side in the world of business and the shores of bad business decisions, “crises, bad hires, weak ethics, questionable acts, misreporting, anger, jealousy, regrets and character-challenged managers” (Lee & Elliott-Lee, 2006). Courage is what a leader needs to get across that river and challenge those issues. Unless the leader has the courage to go over and address the problems that exist in every organization, those problems will continue to amass on the other shore before they inevitably pile on a raft and make their way over to where the organization has tried to get along as though all were calm and all were bright. Courageous leaders take the opportunity to clear out the opposite shore and get both sides of the river looking good.

However, there are a few things a courageous leader has to be mindful of—and that is what the bulk of the book focuses on. One of the main concepts that Lee defines is “Point of Decision” (POD). A POD is a critical intersection within an organization where a leader’s core values are put to the test. They test one’s ethics, one’s moral character, one’s backbone, and one’s commitment. Every courageous leader has to tackle a POD to earn his stripes, Lee states. To illustrate this point, he takes a look at how leaders at Whirlpool, MCI and WorldCom all faced PODs. Whirlpool’s problem, for instance was that it was not meeting its revenue objectives. MCI’s problem was that it was faced with the issue of whether to merge its fiber-optics with WorldCom’s infrastructure. Through facing PODs, however, courageous leaders can “realize sustainable and outstanding results.” If they never face these points of decisions, they never clear out those shores where all the troubles exist.

Lee defines courage as a universal quality that everyone can recognize and possess. He uses real life examples to show how different leaders in different situations approach courage.

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First comes the story of Chris Kay at IntegWare. Lee gives examples of what happens when courage to face decisions is missing—and then at what happens when courage is acquired and implemented. Chris Kay’s story is educational for showing how fear can get in the way of leading courageously, and for showing how fear can be overcome by summoning up one’s own core values. When one acts upon one’s values, the fear of failure evaporates because values…

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…the winds of the times are blowing. The principles of leadership are what promote courage, and one must have courage to insist on principles. It is a reinforcing concept, but ultimately one has to make the decision to be courageous and to move towards the highest core values of all.

In the end, the book then shifts to a discussion of how to be courageous in broader terms. Communicating with courage, leading with courage and solving problems with courage are all discussed. Lee provides some examples here as well, touching on the stories of the leaders in the book—leaders at WorldCom, the FBI, West Point, IntegWare and many others. During this section, the book provides real world situations to help bring the concepts to life.

Overall, this is where the book succeeds best in terms of narrative: the stories are helpful and illustrative and provide depth and insight into the individual’s psychology. They show how everyone essentially faces the same challenges and struggles to overcome issues in their lives that can impact their leadership abilities. These issues have to be dealt with, first and foremost, however, by starting from within and looking at what the individual character can do inside his own person to address and affirm his core values. Making the core values the high values is what Lee says the backbone of leadership is all about. Once the high values are there, the rest comes easy—the communication, the decision-making, all of it. The books stories help to illustrate these ideas in clever and revealing ways, making the read enjoyable,….....

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