Leaders
Made Here: Building a Leadership Culture – Mark Miller (Berrett-Koehler
Publishers)
“___Fill in the blank____ is the only
sustainable competitive advantage”
After stringing together millions of them over the
course of my career, I have to admit, that I am a sucker for words. So when I
read a great line that literally jumps off the page at me, I tend to get fired
up.
When I read the opening part of the line above in
leadership guru and bestselling author, Mark Miller’s new book, Leaders Made Here: Building a Leadership
Culture, I perked up. What was the answer? A quick Google search will
yields things like innovation, a business’s ability to learn faster than their
competition (?) but it is Miller who truly hits on the answer. “Leadership is
the only sustainable competitive advantage.”
While learning at a greater velocity is a competitive
advantage and innovation certainly is as well, it is the sustainability piece
that make it more difficult. But when it comes to leadership and building a
culture of leadership, that all important bench strength, is something that is
doable if a business makes the commitment to make it happen.
Miller, a Chick-fil-A executive and co-author of a
number of bestselling leadership books with Ken Blanchard, uses the time-tested
business parable to impart his story and the leadership culture lessons in Leaders Made Here. While I am not a huge
fan of this style of book, I think Miller does a great job of pretty clearly
delineating actionable steps that businesses can take to create and grow a
leadership culture.
He provides the building blocks that you can put in
place to form the cornerstone of your leadership culture; from agreeing on
basics of a definition of leader and some of the potential roadblocks that can
create within a business if everybody is not on the same page. This would make
for a great exercise to gauge what your leadership team is thinking and how to
build on a unified platform. It cuts down on wasted time, inconsistent messages
and agendas and the lack of focus.
