The Serving Leader by Ken Jennings and John Stahl-Wert

Today, Servant Leadership is taking a prominent place not only in volunteer driven organizations, but also in corporates. With the growing number of "matrix organizations" and teams embracing "Agile" for project delivery and led by a Scrum Master, Servant Leadership skills are the need of the hour.

I had a chance to read the book "The Serving Leader" from the Ken Blanchard Series, written by Ken Jennings and John Stahl-Wert. The authors have sandwiched the Servant Leadership lessons in a fictional story. This blog post summarizes some key lessons and learnings from the book.

 The following are the 5 powerful actions that the authors teach for you to transform your team, your business and your community:

1. Run to Great Purpose 
• To do the most impossible good, strive for the impossible
• Sustain the greatest interest in pursuits beyond self-interest
2. Upend the Pyramid
• You qualify to be first by putting other people first
• Your are in charge principally to charge up others
3. Build on Strengths
• To address your weaknesses, focus on your strengths
• You can't become the best unless other do, too 
4. Raise the Bar
• To serve the many, you first serve the few
• The best reach-down is a challenging reach-up
5. Blaze the Trail
• To protect your value, you must give it all away
• Your biggest obstacle is the one that hinders someone else

Source: The Serving Leader, by Ken Jennings and John Stahl-Wert

Some traits of a servant leader and key messages worth noting from the book:

1. He spent a lot of time in activity that looked more like "teaching" than "managing"
2. He was known for setting high goals and standards.
3. He encouraged risk taking, though he wasn't afraid to remove people for "persistent" underperformance
4. He unleashes the strengths, talents and passions of those he or she serves
5. When she points out a problem, she also offered several solutions and she always showed up when it was time to do the hard work of implementation
6. She constantly gets her ego out of the way and builds up the confidence / self-esteem of others
7. By putting others first, the Serving Leader is able to catalyze the creation of high performance teams
8. He ensures that the right people join the team, those with the right skills and values, those who embrace the same shared purpose. He is tough on selecting people and setting standards
9. In order to serve many people, the servant leader at first picks just a few other leaders to serve, people who can meet the Servant Leadership standards
10. He ensures that "activity" is no substitute for "results". At first its about being selective in choosing the leaders you're going to work with. And second, it's about continually raising the expectations for performance
11. When the performance of an individual doesn't improve after "heavy coaching", the Servant Leader helps him or her get a position somewhere else
12. People by nature try to live up to what others expect of them. That's true for rich and poor, people who have an easy life or a hard one. Expect little, and we live up to the expectation. Expect a lot, and we stretch and grow to meet the expectation. What kind of service is it... when you deny a person the challenge to become really terrific
13. Life is too short to waste on sentimental pursuits that don't actually improve anything
14. Servant Leaders teach others the knowledge, skills and strategies they need to succeed. And the Servant Leaders work hard to get obstacles out of their team's way so that the team can make progress.
15. Servant Leaders build teaching organizations to create excellence at every level. Leaders who teach become consistent in their own performance.
16. Community happens when everyone rolls up their sleeves and gets to work
17. You get better results by shifting attention away from your weaknesses and focusing on your strengths
18. Serving leaders articulate a purpose so compelling that people are willing to run toward it. The leaders set the pace and this spirit gets transferred to the people they serve
19. If the purpose isn't bigger than the people involved, great things wouldn't happen
20. Mistakes aren't the issue, what you do with them is the issue. Ask to be forgiven for the past, and then seize your future with all you've got. 

If you want to learn more about Servant Leadership, visit the authors' website http://theservingleader.com/

(Also read: 10 Servant Leadership lessons from "The Art of War")

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

You call him as charismatic; you call him as argumentative; you call him as a visionary and you call him as brutal. You will be right. When I finished reading the last page of the book "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson, I get the feeling of having watched Baahubali 2. Jobs' tale is both instructive and cautionary. It is a tale of highs, lows, surprises, successes, failures, rivalries, emotions, love, hatred... and everything else that you would see in a movie like Baahubali.

Rob Siltanen's quote "The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do" won't fit anyone else better than Steve Jobs. Jobs aspired to live at the intersection of humanities and technology, and he just did that throughout his life. He always thought that he is special and he compared himself with the likes of Einstein and Gandhi. I am not sure if he is as good as Gandhi, but he definitely made an impact, as big as what Einstein made with the theory of relativity. Jobs' feeling of getting rejected at an early age... created the feeling to prove. He did prove to the world, that he is different.

Steve Jobs not only built great products, but also built great companies. All of the products that he built followed Leonarda Da Vinci's mantra "Simplicity is the ultimate Sophistication".

Both the book and the man, impacted me ... and made me to think. Here are some highlights from the book:

1. Unlike other product developers, Jobs did not believe that customers are always right. He felt customers do not know what they want, until you show them. He didn't just motivate his teams to make mere product advances, but whole new devices and services that consumers did not know they needed. 
2. He loved doing things right. He even cared about the look of parts that you couldn't see. During his childhood days, he learned from his dad about the importance of making even the back of the cabinets and fences properly, even though they were hidden. 
3. He practiced strict vegetarianism (vegan diet) for the major part of his life. 
4. Apple's marketing philosophy - empathy (intimate connection with the feelings of the customer), focus (eliminate whatever opportunities are unimportant), impute (presenting products in a creative, professional manner)
5. Jobs ends up to be brutally honest, telling the truths that most of us sugarcoat or suppress. He usually didn't care an iota of what people actually think of him. According to him, people were either enlightened or assholes. Products were either amazing or shit. 
6. Jobs thought "If you need slides, it shows, you don't know what you are talking about"
7. Jobs was driven by his perfectionism and gets impatience with those who made compromises in order to get a product on time and on budget. People look at him as someone who has reality distortion, especially when he gets too passionate about a product.  
8. Lessons Jobs learned from the Buddhism - material possessions often cluttered life rather than enriched it. So, he embraced "minimalism". He reflected that through the things that he accumulated at home and through the things that he wears everyday. He also applies this philosophy in designing / building products.
9. Jobs wanted to have end to end control over the entire ecosystem, when building products. He believed that for a computer to be truly great, its hardware and software has to be tightly linked. He followed that right from the MAC to the iPhone to the iTunes. He was a believer of creating end to end solutions. 
10. Jobs thought "You have to be ruthless if you want to build a team of A players. Its too easy as a team grows, to put up with a few B players, and then attract a few more B players, and soon you'll even have some C players. A players like to work only with A players. Part of my responsibility, is to be a yardstick for quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected"
11. Jobs is good at focusing on a few things and say no to many things.  He feels that "deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. That's true for companies and that's true for products"
12. The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind. He believed in making hit products and promote them with terrific marketing