A Change to the Positive

The Power of Positive Leadership: How and Why Positive Leaders Transform Teams and Organizations and Change The World – Jon Gordon – (Wiley)

Visit your favorite book store; depending on if it’s a large chain outlet or a local Mom and Pop shop, it’s likely you will find at least a rack full or an entire section dedicated to self-help, positive thought and changing your life in a positive way. While you’re there, ask the staff to point you in the direction of the books on how to be more negative. (Insert cricket sounds here…) It’s not likely that they will be able to point you to even one book that would fall into the category.

The reason is that we are generally wired to gravitate towards being negative. Let’s face it; it’s easy to look at what’s not working in our lives or in our businesses and chew on that for a while. Would it make more sense to focus on what it working well and then amplify that or see if there is a way to take what’s working replicate it in other areas of life and work?

Bestselling business guru Jon Gordon serves up a boatload of examples of how focusing on the positive has had a genuine impact on businesses and teams in his new book, The Power of Positive Leadership: How and Why Positive Leaders Transform Teams and Organizations and Change The World. It would be so easy to slip off into the Pollyanna of positive-ness, but Gordon avoids that by clearly delineating real world examples of how positive leaders, many of whom he has worked with, have super-charged results by making the choice to be positive in the way they approach business, competition and how they operate.

Unlike so many leadership and business books that have hit the racks lately, Gordon does focus only on how the big dogs do things, not everyone is Google or Amazon. Instead he gives actionable steps that any business leader at any stage of development can put into play and see a positive impact on their outcomes.

Gordon does a great job of taking researched ideas how to make the change to the positive and then pairs them with great examples of leaders who have effectively put the ideas into practice.