Review of "The Contrarian Leader"

The problem with being on sabbatical is that I have time to read, and reading leads to thinking, and thinking leads to action, but I'm sabbatical, so there's no chance for action . . . yet. The first book I read on this sabbatical was The Contrarian Leader, lent to me by Mandy Moore, a prof at JBU.

To be honest, I wasn't that excited about Sample's writing through his first five points. Thinking gray is all I ever heard in grad school as a historian. Thinking free is what much of my "wargaming" time is about (and doing so gets me in trouble with faculty more often than not). Listening first . . . and artfully has been the slow process of almost 20 years of marriage to someone whose MBTI is almost exactly opposite of mine. Understanding that experts are of only limited value makes sense to someone who believes in term limits. Being suspicious of pseudoscience comes naturally to an academic (I hope).

So it wasn't until Sample got to "supertexts" that I really started paying attention. That discussion appealed to my historian's instincts and does run counter to much of what I'm bombarded with on a daily basis. The rest of the book, perhaps as a consequence, was more intriguing.

I really resonated with the delegating authority line, and it helped me understand his point about delaying decisions to read that he said "reasonably" delay. My definition of "reasonably" is way different than that of Jim Worthington, the first person who started quoting this book to me.

Ignoring sunk costs is difficult for academia, so that line was helpful. Not humiliating a defeated opponent is straightforward, but it's more difficult in practice than one might think when much of what you do, such as letting an employee go, is pretty public. I struggle with knowing which hill to die on because I'm naturally competitive, so that one was helpful as well. "Doing" VPAA is so much easier than "being" VPAA for me, so I guess I found that one difficult to understand, except perhaps in the sense of involvement I have in the job.

The section I took most to heart was the part about working for those who work for you and spending much of your time in their recruitment, evaluation, and support. The corollary that these are really the only people that you can influence and even then only to a limited degree impacted me also.

The last section on "original" thinking as the key to success is somewhat problematic for someone who believes, and I quote,"the Greeks were the only ones to have had original thoughts. Ever since then, we merely quote each other in increasingly complicated detail." The "originality" in our modern world comes from putting the right pieces together, not in coming up with new pieces.

In general, yes, a pretty good leadership book, grounded, as it appears to be, in some serious historical reflection, unlike much of the leadership literature that I've seen.

For my JBU work, I mainly concluded two things. First, I need to follow up on our recent faculty evaluation efforts with a more systematic approach for dealing with non-faculty evaluations. Second, I should read The Prince again.