Category: Book Summaries

The Truth About Leadership

In 1987, Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner were scheduled to present about leadership at a two-day conference following Tom Peters—a leading management guru at the time. Academics at Santa Clara University, Kouzes and Posner decided to focus on individual leadership skills and the challenges that take place to “make extraordinary things happen.”

Following the presentation, they published The Leadership Challenge—a blockbuster business book that has sold over two million copies. On the 25th anniversary of its publication, they released the fifth edition of the book.

In 2010, Kouzes and Posner published another book entitled The Truth About Leadership: The No-Fads, Heart-of-the-Matter Facts You Need to Know.  As they point out, the context of leadership has changed dramatically since they first asked people in the early 1980s to describe their personal best leadership experiences and their most admired leaders.

However, as the context of leadership has changed, the content of leadership has not changed much at all. The fundamental behaviors, actions, and practices of leaders have remained essentially the same since Kouzes and Posner first began researching and writing about leadership nearly four decades ago.

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The Essential Question: How You Can Make a Difference for God

As we consider The Question of the Ages this month, Whitney T. Kuniholm—President of Scripture Union/USA and former executive vice president of Prison Fellowship Ministries—pushes us to consider The Essential Question: How You Can Make a Difference for God.

Most people want to make a positive impact with their lives—through education, career, family, service to the community or through accomplishing some notable goal or achievement.

Human beings seem to have a built-in longing to make their lives count for something more. The philosopher Plato reportedly described the human as “a being in search of meaning.” And in more recent times, Viktor Frankl, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps and author of the classic book Man’s Search for Meaning, wrote, “Man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life.”

“Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness” (Matthew 6:33). That’s our mission statement.

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