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August 2009
Email: gcohen@co2partners.com
Dear Readers,
JUST ASK LEADERSHIP: Why Great Managers Always Ask the Right Questions is now available!
So many leaders - CEOs, military, religious, and heads of nonprofits - contributed to the book that it would be foolish to try to thank them all here. I am immensely grateful for their stories and question-asking tips, however. It makes for a rich chorus of voices.
I am equally indebted to a different set of voices - early readers of the book. David Brake, the CEO of the Content Connections, provided us with focus groups and sophisticated response technology, so that we could ask readers what they wanted and how we did at delivering against those wants. We were graded along categories like: voice of the author, usefulness of content, readability, and quality of examples. Our reviewers included a university president, CEOs of multinational corporations, a four-star general, and some great business authors. I read every line of their chapter-specific comments and discussed them in depth with my team.
JUST ASK LEADERSHIP received better grades and reviews than all but one of the bestsellers that we were matched up against. It received 3.4 (out of 4) points for its overall sales viability rating, making it one of the highest rated titles among over 1,000 manuscripts reviewed by Content Connections. With a readability rating of 3.6 and author reputation rating of 3.6, as well, Brake wrote, "The bottom line is that reviewers like this book." Over 65% of them, in fact, said that they were extremely or very likely to purchase the book upon publication.
I was pleased to learn how JUST ASK LEADERSHIP stacked up against the competition, but I was determined to make it even better. After discussing all the wonderful input from readers with my editor, Eric Vrooman, and the folks at Content Connections (Brake and Holly McAllister, in particular), I changed the book's title, dropped a chapter, and rewrote some sections. The book is vastly improved as a result.
Eric has taught fiction writing at a number of colleges and universities. The motto of most creative writing workshops is "Show, Don't Tell." In effect, this means don't tell readers what you want them to get from your story. Show them the characters, setting, actions, and dialogue, and let readers find their own meaning.
The best fiction asks tough questions and doesn't provide all the answers. Fiction that provides answers (like fables with morals at the end) may be appropriate for children, but adults seek and deserve more challenging material.
While JUST ASK LEADERSHIP isn't fiction, Eric and I respect the reader's time and abilities, the same way that exceptional leaders do of their coworkers. Exceptional leaders engage their workers with questions and act as a resource, not an oracle. They don't care as much about building their own ego as they do about building leaders at every level of the organization.
Entrepreneurs' Organization, Leadership Excellence, BusinessWeek.com, McKinsey Quarterly, Forbes.com, and Markets Media Magazine have all invited me to contribute articles in the next few weeks.
Question-based leadership is in demand, but it's also demanding. It's harder, in many respects, to come up with just the right questions to motivate your coworkers than it is to issue a command. That's why I hired two of the best assessment and training gurus (Brian Ferro & Keith Morical) to create a program that helps leaders incorporate the lessons from the book.
The assessment and training provides leaders with the type of feedback we got from early readers of JUST ASK LEADERSHIP. It helps leaders like you discover your questioning style (Professor, Innovator, Director, or Judge) and tailor your approach. Unlike Meyers Briggs and DISC, ours isn't a personality test. Your leadership style is, and ought to be, flexible enough to accommodate different, hard-wired personalities. And we show you how.
For a free self-assessment, I encourage you to go to JustAskLeadership.com
Thanks again, everyone, for helping make JUST ASK LEADERSHIP the book that it is! It truly was a team effort.
The Backstory: How One New Author Got His Book Published by McGraw-Hill
Interview by G.L. Hoffman
Ed. Note: Gary Cohen is a friend of mine here in Minnesota. He is a proven entrepreneur, one of the companies he started went from two employees to over 2,000. Seriously. He is a thoughtful, interesting guy to say the least. As he was developing his business, he discovered how important being a leader was instead of just being a manager. That started him off on a lifetime of learning about leadership. His study of leadership took him on an interesting nearly three year journey that culminated with the publication of his new book Just Ask Leadership.
I am not a book reviewer. But I did find the story of how a business leader developed even more leadership skills himself to be fascinating. But not nearly as fascinating as the story of how a guy with a learning disability applied his entrepreneural skills to publishing a book. I don't think many business writers approach their writings with such determination. I hope you like this Q and A format. Warning: it is long. You should buy the book.
Here is the interview with Gary Cohen, author of Just Ask Leadership:
Gary, what caused you to write this book? Was there something you just had to say? What was the inspiration?
What is it? I don't know, really. What is it that continued to bother me? It was not the desire to write a book. It was not about creating a business. I had just left one and was on a sabbatical. I was enjoying the downtime - although my mind was a bit restless. It was this nagging sense of something unsaid on the subject of leadership. This is a subject that is well documented, has many scholarly opinions and many practitioners working to develop models to make it easier to comprehend for the next generation of leaders. Still, the entire subject has always fascinated me and the more I studied, and learned from others, the more I felt a longer lasting commitment to it.
What was it that you wanted to contribute that, frankly, has not been covered in so many ways by so many different authors?
I had taken part in many leadership programs from Outward Bound, OPM at Harvard Business School, Covey Leadership Institute, Disney Leadership Institute, and lastly as a Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute. I have learned so much through these programs about being a better leader and yet something kept gnawing at me. It was a missing a piece. How did these things connect with me and how I went about my day as a leader?
Read the rest of this interview >>
Eat the Book - A Private CEO Breakfast Gathering series kicked off 7:30 am on August 25
Thank you to our group of CEO business leaders that attended the first in a series of thought moving exchanges between authors and leaders in the business community.
Eat the Book has been offered by CO2 Partners as an opportunity to share our commitment to life long learning and connecting leaders to relevant topics and shared experiences. This month our topic was on "Leadership in this economy... what is it going to take?" CO2 was pleased to present John Foley the author of "Balanced Brand" and the founder and CEO of LEVEL, a brand and reputation firm in Minneapolis. John spoke on how to balance the stakeholder forces that can make or break your business. He was spot on and connected to the group as was evidenced by the amount of discussion and participation as he concluded his remarks. The premise of the "balance" is rooted in understanding that your brand and your reputation must be strong. The core values of your organization and the resulting alignment of culture, brand and reputation will affect the customer experience. Lack of alignment could mean that your organization may not be creating a unified customer experience.
Eat the Book - A Private CEO Breakfast Gathering will meet again on Tuesday September 15. Our featured guest author will be Gary Cohen sharing from his book "Just Ask Leadership" - Why great managers always ask the right questions.
The attendance is limited to twenty CEO leaders in our community. If you are interested in attending please follow this link for the invitation to our next gathering: Eat the Book
As a follow up to this month’s event John Foley has offered to have lunch with a selected individual who responds to this thought on the Balanced Brand. Here it is: What is critical to the relationship between a company's stated values and it's operational values?
Please respond by end of day September 8, 2009 to jletourneau@CO2Partners.com and of the responses received a random selection will be made to attend lunch with John.
All the Best,
John LeTourneau
Executive Leadership Coach
CO2 Partners, Minneapolis
Interested in Learning More?
Click Here for the CO2 E Brochure
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