I’ve been dropping quotes from this book over the past few weeks, but now that I’ve finished the book I can share some thoughts in summary. It’s one of the best books I’ve read this year and one of the best I’ve ever read. It’s where leadership and family systems meet and if you know me well, this intersection has been one of my personal hobbies over the past three years. It’s captured my imagination and stirred up significant motivation and passion for it’s relevance to corporate life with God and beyond.
While I can’t summarize all of his thoughts briefly, the book is essentially about leadership and the self in the context of a relationship system. Self-differentiation is the centerpiece of this book as the critical mark of the mature self/leader that can withstand the sabotage of the immature and anxious. Friedman strongly advocates that leaders looking for quick fixes give into the immature, anxious, and problematic while they should be focused on developing their own sense of self and forcing the immature to adapt to maturity.
Friedman brings profound insights to the leadership discussion that run counter to much of modern leadership development theory today. It’s refreshing and offers new categories of thought that allow one to think bigger and deeper than what we often are encouraged to. Friedman encourages responsibility for self, separateness and well-defined self in the context of the togetherness of community, and adventurous risk-taking. It really is a “new” way of looking at leadership. It’s holistic, not pragmatic and that is refreshing to me.
If you are tired of bashing your head against a wall in your current environment, this is a great book to help you think differently about your own development and capacity for influence and leading change out of a mature self.
My words don’t do it justice, but hopefully they piqued your interest a little bit. This is one that is worth making time for.
