Category: Leadership Qualities

Happy National Book Lovers Day

National Book Lovers Day is celebrated on August 9 every year in the United States. This is an unofficial holiday observed to encourage reading and literature. In fact, people are advised to put away their smartphones and every possible technological distraction and pick up a book to read.

In honor of National Book Lovers Day, I offer a summary of Max DePree’s leadership masterpiece Leadership is an Art.  This is the book’s 30th anniversary of its 1989 publication.  It is an oft-quoted book among leadership books.

I picked it up in a Half-Price Bookstore in Tumwater, Washington while on a trip to speak to the State of Washington’s Department of Retirement Services.  I read it at Angle Lake Park in Seattle (pictured above)—a great setting!

Click here to enjoy a summary of Max DePree’s Leadership is an Art

Happy Friendship Day

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. - Mark Twain

Joyce Hall, founder of Hallmark Cards, initiated “Friendship Day”—a day for celebrating friendships by holiday celebrations—on August 2, 1930.  Friendship Day was met with consumer resistance, given that it was too obviously a commercial gimmick to promote the sales of greeting cards. By the 1940s, the holiday largely died out in the United States.

However, it has been kept alive and revitalized in Asia.  In honor of Friendship Day in 1998, Nane Annan, wife of the UN Secretary-General at the time, named Winnie the Pooh as the world’s Ambassador of Friendship at the United Nations.

Some countries, including India, celebrate Friendship Day on the first Sunday of August.  So, Happy Friendship Day!

In honor of the day, I’m offering a summary of John Maxwell’s Be A People Person: Effective Leadership Through Effective Relationships.

Click here to continue