Effective Leadership

Contrarian's Guide to Leadership and Apex Thinking

Contrarian's Guide to Leadership and Apex Thinking

Introduction

Being a leader can be great and hard thing as well. You have the control to modify things, but you do not have the control to modify people. You can transform how a government is running, how an organization handles its finances, and how individuals handle their debts; but you cannot make lazy individuals work harder, nor can you turn dull people into geniuses. What you can do, however, is encourage individuals to improve and this is a job you can achieve only if you are a good leader. Leadership skills are important but developing skills is usually easier and often quicker than developing character. So, if a leader has the requisite ingredients of the right character, he or she will find it much easier to learn the skills of leadership.

This position paper discusses the two books Contrarian's Guide to Leadership and Apex Thinking.

Contrarian's Guide to Leadership

The book, "The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership,” is written by Steven B. Sample. In this book, Sample explains his views and definitions of a contrarian leader. He explains how these leaders make their organization successful. Such leader skillfully handles all his responsibility and manages to lead his team towards success. Sample demonstrates a very esoteric and personal leadership model from his experiences which he gained in his two universities. He provides his personal experiences to the readers as examples to support his thesis and argument.

According to Sample, a leader, instead of wasting his time in reading trade journals, newspapers and keeping up with current affairs, he should focus on reading books which have been continuously being read for over 400 years. Such readings are referred to as super texts by Sample. According to Sample, a leader must depend and trust the members of his team for keeping up with the daily current events. Sample explains that one cannot just copy excellence; they have to achieve the true excellence by unconventional approaches and original thinking. Sample believes that one can learn these things from Homer but not from the New York Times. Sample is right in saying that excellence cannot be copied. No matter how much you try to copy the great things of others, you cannot achieve it. One has to have original thinking in order to attain your own achievements, success and excellence (Sample, 2001).

As a leader invests time in building trust and developing robust relationships with their people, they increase the likelihood of their team members going the extra mile. It is worth noting that there's never a traffic jam along the extra mile, as not enough people go there. Team members, who do go the extra mile, will also be noticed for the right reasons. It really is a win-win situation. Leaders and teams all benefit from the 'virtuous circle' created by their mutual willingness to do their best for one another and for the organization.

He draws on some western classics and Machiavelli heavily and his evaluation about ...