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The UnConventional Strategist – Building, Keeping, and Thriving in Your Career
The UnConventional Strategist, by Jay Nakagawa, is a conversational business strategy book, leadership book, and career development guide built around the idea that strategic thinking comes from experience, curiosity, judgment, and action. Nakagawa draws on decades in product management, sales, competitive intelligence, international business, mentoring, music, and family life to show how people learn to recognize patterns and make decisions with incomplete information. The book moves through five broad areas, from becoming strategic and executing a vision to competitive intelligence, professional behavior, legacy, and the long game of a career.
What gives this book its personality is Nakagawa’s willingness to teach through stories. Negotiations in Japan, troubled product launches, awkward customer meetings, corporate politics, raising five children, public speaking, and playing music all become lessons in strategy. His central principles are practical and easy to remember: validate a problem before building a solution, listen for what people aren’t saying, move before the data is perfect, know your strengths, control the pace of a negotiation, and treat competitive intelligence as a way of seeing. He’s especially effective when connecting strategic foresight with execution, since the book repeatedly shows how insight only becomes valuable when someone has the nerve to act on it.
The voice is blunt, funny, and personal, with plenty of pop culture references, sharp metaphors, and candid accounts of mistakes. That style makes a long business leadership book feel more like an extended conversation with an experienced mentor. At times, the repeated slogans and end-of-chapter lesson summaries make points that are already clear, and some of the humor lands more strongly than other bits. Still, the repetition reflects the book’s coaching approach. Nakagawa wants readers to remember the principles when they’re facing a difficult meeting, a stalled decision, a political workplace, or a competitor that’s moving faster than expected.
The book’s most satisfying shift comes in its later chapters, where strategy expands beyond markets and products into time, identity, mentorship, succession, and legacy. Nakagawa presents career strategy as the deliberate management of a whole life, including work, relationships, health, creativity, and the people you help develop. That broader perspective gives the book more emotional weight than a standard competitive intelligence or strategic management guide. The UnConventional Strategist is a practical, spirited field guide for product leaders, executives, strategists, entrepreneurs, and professionals who want to think more clearly, build better judgment, and create a career whose value continues through other people.
Pages: 338 | ASIN : B0GX2RYLM5
Resilience and Authenticity
Wake-Up Calls follows your journey from grieving daughter to funeral home owner, mentor, and advocate as you transform loss and leadership lessons into a call for humane and compassionate deathcare. Why was this an important book for you to write?
Wake-Up Calls is about much more than my own story. It’s about the moments in life that challenge us, change us, and ultimately call us to become better leaders and better people. When I unexpectedly lost my father, I was suddenly faced with leading our family funeral, cremation, and cemetery business before I felt ready. That experience, along with the many personal and professional challenges that followed, taught me lessons that I couldn’t have learned any other way.
After more than 40 years in funeral service, I realized those experiences could help others, particularly women entering a profession that’s evolving rapidly. Today, women make up a growing majority of funeral and deathcare professionals, yet many still face obstacles in acceptance, mentorship, and long-term career growth. I wanted to offer the kind of guidance I wish I’d had early in my career through honest storytelling, practical leadership lessons, and encouragement.
I’m especially proud that every dollar of proceeds from Wake-Up Calls supports non-profit organizations dedicated to advancing leadership education for both men and women in the profession. That’s an extension of the book’s purpose: investing in the future of our profession and the compassionate leaders who will shape it.
What was the most difficult personal memory to revisit while writing Wake-Up Calls?
That’s not a question I answer lightly, because writing it meant living it all over again.
The most difficult memory was the day my dad died. He died suddenly and at a young age of 53, without warning, and I was eight years into my career at Baue’s when the call came.
But the moment that truly undid me was when I stood alone in his office afterward. The room still smelled like him, pipe tobacco, and his cologne. I found the letter in his desk drawer, the one addressed to my brothers and me that said, “Open if your mother and I are gone.”
And I looked at his chair. I thought, do I dare sit in it? I sat down. And I fell apart.
Through my tears, I actually asked out loud, “Dad, what am I supposed to do now? I don’t know how to run a business. Who will help me now that you are gone?”
Writing that scene meant going back to the girl I was in that moment. A young woman, a new mother, a funeral director who could help other families navigate grief, but had no idea how to navigate her own. I had been raised to be tough. Baues didn’t cry; we plowed through, no matter what.
And there I was, crying in my father’s chair, talking to a man who could no longer answer me.
That was the hardest page of the book to write. And it’s the one I’m most grateful I didn’t skip.
What do you hope young women entering the deathcare profession take away from your story?
More than anything, I hope they see that they belong here and that their voices matter. This profession needs leaders who bring empathy, innovation, resilience and authenticity.
I hope they learn to trust their instincts and embrace opportunities even when they feel unprepared. Some of the most important growth in my own career came from difficult experiences.
I also want them to know they don’t have to do it alone. That’s a big reason I founded the Funeral Women Lead Foundation: to help women “unleash their greatness” and create opportunities for mentorship, leadership development and long-term support for them across every stage of their careers. When we invest in each other, everyone benefits.
Looking back, what leadership lesson did grief teach you that success alone never could?
Grief taught me that leadership begins with compassion. Success often focuses on achievements and outcomes, but grief reminds you that every decision ultimately affects people. Experiencing profound personal loss gave me a much deeper understanding of what the families we serve go through, and it changed how I led my team as well.
It also taught me resilience. Leadership isn’t about avoiding hardship; it’s about learning how to move through it with integrity, courage and grace.
I hope readers come away understanding that our greatest challenges often become our greatest teachers and that compassionate leadership can transform not only businesses but also the lives of others.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
In Wake-Up Calls, Lisa Baue shares the pivotal moments that shaped her into one of the most influential voices in the funeral and deathcare profession. She invites you into the heart of her leadership journey by sharing deeply personal stories and hard-won business lessons, helping you expand your knowledge, develop your grit, and embrace your heart for serving others.
Wake-Up Calls is both a rallying cry and a road map. While women are the future of the profession, they continue to face challenges that cause them to leave in large numbers. Lisa’s mission is to change that. Blending memoir with mentorship, she guides women to become the confident, compassionate leaders the industry needs.
From unexpected challenges to defining breakthroughs, Lisa reveals how each “wake-up call” became a catalyst for growth. Her story is a powerful reminder that women can not only succeed but also transform the profession from the inside out.
The Resilience Mindset: How Adversity Can Strengthen Individuals, Teams, and Leaders
The Resilience Mindset is Terry Healey’s part memoir, part practical guide to living through adversity without letting it harden or diminish you. Healey begins with the devastating cancer diagnosis he received as a young UC Berkeley student, then follows the long aftermath of surgery, facial difference, recovery, faith, work, support, and self-rebuilding. From there, he shapes those hard-won lessons into his ReBAR framework: Reflect, Build, Act, and Renew. The book widens near the end through stories of people such as Robert Paylor, Shawn Harper, Jamie MoCrazy, and Jason Schechterle, each of whom has faced profound hardship and found a way to keep moving toward purpose.
Healey doesn’t write about resilience as if it’s a glossy slogan on a conference wall. He writes from the raw place where fear has a pulse. The scene after the Tumor Board, when he runs to the restroom after hearing he might lose part of his face and possibly his eye, is painful in a way that feels completely human. So is the moment on the Bay Bridge when Corey Hart’s “Never Surrender” comes on the radio and suddenly, almost mysteriously, the world lets in a little light. I found that tenderness persuasive. The “take it away” guy could have felt too neat in another book, but here the encounter lands because Healey is so alive to the small mercies that arrive when a person is nearly out of strength.
I also appreciated the book’s central idea that confidence can be rebuilt through repeated, deliberate acts. That feels compassionate and useful. The ReBAR framework has a sturdy, workable quality, especially when Healey connects reflection to gratitude, action to risk, and renewal to the daily work of becoming less afraid of change. The book leans into encouragement and statistics. I appreciated how the book leans into encouragement and supporting research, giving its message both warmth and structure. Even when the prose moves quickly from pain toward purpose, that momentum feels true to Healey’s larger vision: resilience as an active, daily practice rather than a place where we stay still for too long. The writing has a warm directness that suits the material. Healey’s voice is earnest, and even when the book becomes more workbook-like, it never loses the sense that someone real is sitting across from you, offering what helped him survive.
The Resilience Mindset understands that adversity is not a single dramatic event, but a long-term internal weather system that changes how a person sees everything. Its best passages are the ones where Healey lets vulnerability and resolve stand side by side. This is a good book for readers facing illness, grief, career disruption, insecurity, or any season that has shaken their sense of self, and it will especially resonate with people who like personal stories braided with practical reflection. I’d recommend it to anyone who needs a steady, humane reminder that rebuilding is rarely glamorous, but it can be deeply beautiful.
Pages: 208 | ISBN : 978-1770418561
Awareness Changes Things
Unfollow the Leader makes the case that the performance-at-all-costs model of leadership is burning people out, and that success can cost you your health, your relationships, and yourself. What did you most want readers to “unlearn” about leadership?
I think one of the biggest things I wanted people to unlearn is the idea that leadership is primarily about image, status, certainty, control, or constant performance.
So often, we are conditioned to believe leadership means pushing harder, sacrificing ourselves, always appearing strong, always knowing the answers, and tying our worth to outcomes and achievement. For a while, that behaviour is often rewarded. Until eventually the cracks begin to show in our health, our relationships, our nervous system, and our sense of self.
A lot of this happens at a subconscious level.
Intellectually, most people already understand that balance matters, that relationships matter, that health matters, that presence matters. But understanding something consciously and embodying it behaviourally are two very different things. Many of these patterns are built deeply into the psyche over decades through family systems, workplaces, society, fear, survival, conditioning, and identity.
People often do not realise how much of their leadership is being driven by unconscious fear. Fear of failure. Fear of not being enough. Fear of losing control. Fear of being judged. Fear of slowing down.
Somewhere along the way, people disconnect from themselves while trying to become who they think they need to be. They become productive, but not present. Accomplished, but exhausted. Surrounded by people, but emotionally disconnected.
I wanted readers to question the idea that success at any cost is actually success.
For me, leadership is not about becoming somebody important. It is about becoming more conscious, more honest, more grounded, and more responsible for the impact we have on other human beings.
I also wanted people to unlearn the belief that humanity weakens leadership. Some of the strongest leaders I have ever met are deeply self-aware people who can regulate themselves under pressure, hold difficult conversations with care, stay open to feedback, admit mistakes, and create environments where people feel psychologically safe enough to think, contribute, and grow.
That takes far more strength than simply dominating a room.
Health, Head, and Heart is a deceptively simple structure. What took you the longest to understand about the relationship between those three, and what do most leaders get wrong about the order?
What took me the longest to understand is that they are not separate parts of leadership. They constantly affect each other, whether we acknowledge it or not.
You cannot think clearly when your body is exhausted. You cannot lead people well when your nervous system is constantly operating in stress or survival mode. You cannot consistently make values-based decisions when your identity is tied entirely to achievement, approval, or external
validation.
For years, leadership development focused heavily on the “Head.” Strategy, intellect, execution, KPIs, performance. Those things matter. Of course they do. But without Health and Heart, eventually the entire system becomes unstable.
What many of us get wrong is the order.
We sacrifice Health first while chasing success, disconnect from Heart while trying to maintain performance, and eventually even the Head begins to suffer. Decision-making becomes reactive. Relationships deteriorate. Clarity disappears. We begin operating from pressure rather than presence.
And much of this happens unconsciously.
At an intellectual level, most people already know they should rest more, slow down sometimes, prioritise relationships, regulate stress, and take care of themselves. But behaviour is often driven by much deeper subconscious conditioning around productivity, worth, identity, survival, and fear.
A lot of us inherit patterns we never consciously chose.
Health is not just fitness or diet. It is energy, emotional regulation, capacity, sleep, wellbeing, and the overall state of your nervous system.
Heart is not weakness or sentimentality. It is values, courage, emotional intelligence, humility, empathy, connection, and the ability to remain human under pressure.
And the Head functions best when supported by both.
That understanding did not come from theory for me. It came from life. From burnout. From grief. From leadership. From watching incredibly intelligent and capable people slowly disconnect from themselves while trying to hold everything together.
The framework became less about perfect balance and more about awareness. Learning to recognise the subconscious patterns driving our behaviour before the consequences become impossible to ignore.
The S.T.O.P. tool is one of the book’s practical anchors. How did you arrive at that particular intervention, and what does it do that other pause-and-reflect tools don’t?
The S.T.O.P. framework came from years of coaching leaders, teams, and individuals who intellectually knew what to do, but struggled to access that wisdom in real moments of pressure.
That gap fascinated me for years.
I realised most people do not fail because they lack information. The struggle is often that subconscious emotional patterns and conditioned responses take over before conscious awareness has a chance to enter the room.
Intellectually, we often know how we want to behave. We know we should listen more, react less, communicate better, stay calm, lead with empathy, or have more patience. But in moments of stress, fear, exhaustion, ego, or threat, human beings tend to default to deeply wired survival patterns that exist beneath conscious thought.
S.T.O.P. was designed to interrupt that automatic cycle.
It was designed to be simple because in moments of pressure, people rarely access complicated frameworks effectively. There is an art to taking complexity, overwhelm, and moving parts and turning them into practical simplicity that people can actually execute consistently in real life.
What makes it different is that it is not just a mindset tool or a reflective exercise. It is a practical blueprint that helps bring strategy, behaviour, culture, communication, accountability, and execution together in a way that people can actually operationalise day to day.
It breaks things down to the lowest common denominator so people and organisations can implement change step by step rather than becoming overwhelmed by theory.
The framework brings together Health, Head, and Heart through the right operating rhythm, practical templates, behaviours, meeting structures, communication rhythms, accountability processes, and ways of working from beginning to end.
It starts with purpose, goals, values, and culture. It moves into flow, emotional regulation, engagement, clarity, accountability, and execution.
More than anything, it is designed to align the human side of leadership with the operational side of business so they are no longer working against each other.
For me, S.T.O.P. became the blueprint that underpins it all.
The intention was never to create another leadership concept that sounds good intellectually but becomes difficult to apply practically once real pressure enters the room. It was designed to help people turn awareness into behaviour, and behaviour into culture, rhythm, and execution.
Whether it is a one-person business, a family, a small team, or a large global matrix organisation, the human dynamics underneath remain remarkably similar. People still need clarity, trust, emotional awareness, consistency, communication, ownership, and alignment.
S.T.O.P. helps reconnect the body, thoughts, emotions, awareness, behaviour, and organisational rhythm together in a practical way.
It helps create enough space between stimulus and response for a conscious choice to emerge instead of an automatic reaction.
Sometimes that pause lasts five seconds. Sometimes it lasts longer. But within that space, people often reconnect to their values, their intentions, and the version of themselves they actually want to lead from.
I have seen it shift difficult conversations, workplace conflict, parenting moments, leadership decisions, and even the way people speak to themselves internally.
It is important to recognise that most damage in leadership does not happen because people are intentionally harmful. It happens because under pressure, awareness narrows and old protective patterns take over before we even realise it.
S.T.O.P. helps bring awareness back online, while also giving people a practical structure to consistently turn that awareness into behaviour, culture, and execution.
The reflective prompts invite pause and self-examination. What do you hope happens in the reader between the reading and the answering, and what would you say to a reader who skips them?
For me, the space between the reading and the answering is probably where the real work begins.
It is easy to consume ideas intellectually. It is much harder to sit honestly with ourselves.
The prompts were never designed as homework. They were designed as interruptions. Small invitations to slow down long enough to notice patterns, beliefs, fears, behaviours, contradictions, and the ways people may have drifted away from themselves without even realising it.
A lot of what drives human behaviour lives beneath conscious awareness.
We can intellectually understand ourselves far more than we emotionally, behaviourally, or subconsciously embody that understanding. Someone can explain emotional intelligence beautifully while still reacting defensively in relationships or leadership. A person can deeply value presence while living in a constant state of internal urgency.
Awareness changes things, and because there is no limit to awareness, it does not happen instantly or perfectly. But once something is seen clearly, it becomes very difficult to completely unsee it.
I hope readers become curious rather than judgmental of themselves. So many people are carrying pressure, grief, burnout, fear, responsibility, and expectations they have never fully stopped to examine. Sometimes, even one honest question can begin bringing hidden patterns into awareness.
And if someone skips the prompts, that is okay, too. Not everybody is ready to pause immediately. Sometimes people read a book intellectually first and only later realise certain parts stayed with them long after they finished reading.
I think timing matters in growth. But I would gently say this. The book is not really meant to be consumed as information alone. It is meant to be experienced, and the value is not in agreeing with the ideas. It is in noticing where those ideas meet your actual life.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Drawing on over 25 years across corporate, government, and grassroots sectors, Reem Borrows shows how real leaders align Health, Head, and Heart to create trust, accountability, and sustainable results. With honesty and insight, she invites you to redefine success—not by doing more, but by leading with clarity, courage, and integrity.
This book shows how to align strategy, behaviour, and culture so organisations perform and people thrive. It also includes three practical downloadable resources designed for immediate implementation.
Inside, you will discover how to:
Replace outdated leadership habits with values that inspire genuine trust
Lead with emotional intelligence and empathy, without losing authority
Align personal well-being with professional performance
Build cultures of accountability and psychological safety
Develop self-leadership as the foundation for leading others
Benefits of reading this book:
Authentic Leadership: Lead with integrity, clarity, and confidence
Sustainable Success: Balance well-being and performance for lasting impact
Cultural Transformation: Create teams grounded in trust, safety, and purpose
This is more than a leadership book. It’s a call to rethink how we lead, connect, and create change in the modern world.
Between Flights: Reflections on the Unspoken Truths of Leadership and Life
Between Flights is a reflective leadership memoir in fragments, written out of airports, late-night flights, and the exhausted spaces in between a demanding career and a fully lived personal life. Author Wendy Walker builds the book less as a manual than as a series of honest landings, circling around ambition, empathy, confidence, burnout, identity, grief, patience, and the quiet recalibrations that keep a person from drifting too far from herself. What stayed with me most was the governing image of the book itself: that leadership is often shaped not in the loud moments of performance, but in the pauses, the delays, the window-seat silences where the truth finally catches up.
What I admired most is that Walker writes from inside the strain, not from some polished summit beyond it. When she describes opening her Notes app after a text from her son and typing, “This pace isn’t sustainable,” the book declares its emotional contract immediately: it’s going to tell the truth, even when the truth is tender or inconvenient. I found that candor appealing. The best sections have a lived grain to them, especially when she moves from abstraction into scene, like the quarterly review where empathy with a frightened sales leader changes the whole conversation, or the chapter on ambition where she refuses the noisy, conventional version of success in favor of something steadier and more interior. I also liked the book’s generosity. It doesn’t sneer at vulnerability or worship hardness. It keeps returning, with real conviction, to the idea that presence matters more than perfection, and that landed with me.
Walker trusts her images and lets them do the work, and I found that to be a strength. The aviation motif gives the reflections shape and lift. “The window seat perspective,” “holding pattern,” “landing gear,” “cabin pressure,” these metaphors create a quiet coherence across the book, and they suit its meditative temperament. I was especially moved by the chapters that widen leadership beyond performance into emotional weather: the heartbreak of a promotion that vanishes, the need to land a season well before taking off again, the insistence that emotion is not the enemy of judgment but one of its instruments.
Between Flights is less interested in teaching leadership than in humanizing it, and I think that’s exactly why it works. It’s warm without being soft, thoughtful without becoming abstract, and personal without collapsing into self-display. I’d recommend it to readers who are carrying a lot, especially leaders, working parents, women in senior roles, and anyone in a season of reassessment who wants a book that feels like calm company rather than instruction from a podium. It’s a graceful, intelligent reminder that sometimes the most important course correction begins in stillness.
Pages: 238 | ISBN : 978-1998528745
People Are Complex
Maximizing Organizational Performance is a practical guide that delves deeply into the power of performance coaching within organizations, outlining a clear, real-world approach to building coaching systems that help individuals grow and perform at their best. Why was this an important book for you to write?
The driving force behind Maximizing Organizational Performance: A Guide to Effective Performance Coaching was a need to reframe how we see and use coaching. I don’t view it as a profession in itself. I see it as a tool, one of many that come under the wider discipline of organizational development. As an OD practitioner first and a coach second, I am primarily interested in the system, that is, in how structure, process, leadership behaviors, culture, and other factors interplay and serve to facilitate—or sometimes constrain—performance.
Coaching is a means to that end. It’s a way of helping people and teams work more effectively. I wrote this book because I saw a need for more context in the way that coaching is being applied. It’s too often used as a tactical intervention, deployed against individuals without consideration of the broader system they inhabit. But individual performance can’t be elevated in a vacuum. If we want to build real, lasting performance, it has to be intentional and systemic. It has to connect to strategy, talent, culture, and other levers of organizational transformation.
That’s what this book is about. In it, I try to offer a different perspective on how coaching can be used. I try to give leaders and HR professionals a roadmap for weaving it into the DNA of their organizations so it can become a central part of how performance is created and sustained, not a niche service available to a select few.
What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this book?
I think one of the important ideas I wanted to convey is that performance coaching is not this ethereal thing that only happens at the C-suite level or during major life-or-death situations. It’s an everyday practice — a way of thinking, a way of leading, a way of showing up for and supporting one another at all levels of an organization. In my experience, coaching has the most impact when it becomes part of a manager’s normal leadership routine rather than an event that takes place quarterly, behind closed doors, with an external coach.
Another key idea for me was personalization. We often fall into the trap of thinking that performance can be optimized through standardized processes alone. How many organizations today still have standardized KPIs, standardized quarterly reviews, and serve only generic training programs? The hard truth is, people are complex. They bring unique strengths, challenges, motivations, and life experiences to work every day. Coaching works best when it’s attuned to that complexity, when it’s tailored and human. And it is only through that level of personalization that coaching can do more than keep people compliant. It’s only then that coaching can foster true growth and commitment.
And, I guess, if I have to pick the most foundational idea, it is that organizations aiming to sustain their competitive advantage can no longer afford to treat coaching as a discretionary add-on. If you’re serious about adaptability, that is, if you’re serious about building a resilient, high-performing team that can thrive in the conditions we all face today, then coaching is not a frill. It is a strategic infrastructure.
What is one piece of advice you wish someone had given you when you were younger?
If I could send a letter to my younger self, one message would be clear and resounding: “Lead with curiosity, not control.” In the early stages of my leadership journey, I equated being a good manager with knowing all the answers, moving fast, and pushing hard. Hyperfocused on outcomes, I regularly burned out and missed breakthroughs. I didn’t realize, as I do now, that sustainable leadership isn’t about being the best person in the room; it’s about setting the stage for others to be their best selves.
Curiosity makes all the difference. It starts conversations that would otherwise be shut down. It builds trust. It signals safety to experiment and learn. It lets people know that you see them not just as performers but as professionals with potential still to be realized. Shifting my stance from directing to inquiring has been one of the most liberating lessons of my career, one I wish I had learned much earlier.
What is one thing that you hope readers take away from Maximizing Organizational Performance?
If there is one thing I hope readers take away from this book, it is that coaching is a multiplier — not only for everything we do to strengthen and support individual performance, but also for culture, engagement, innovation, and sustainable success. Coaching is not fixing. Coaching is about unlocking what’s already inside and connecting that to the purpose, values, and direction of the business.
The real beauty of coaching is that it moves us away from the reactionary leadership models that lead so many of our organizations to scramble after performance problems, react to disengagement, and attempt to fill talent gaps at the eleventh hour. Coaching allows us to think and act more proactively, to have an intentional framework to develop people in a way that is both strategic and radically human.
I hope that when readers finish this book, they have more than new tools at their disposal. I hope that they will look at coaching and development as fundamental leadership practices and leave this book even more inspired to create work cultures where development is not limited to the chosen few who receive development, but where it is part of the way we talk to one another every day, the way we measure success, and the very DNA of our culture.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Dr. Patrick Behar-Courtois, with over two decades of international consulting experience, offers a fresh approach to performance coaching that transcends traditional methods. This practical guide tackles pressing issues such as remote work, diversity, employee retention, and technological integration, equipping leaders, HR professionals, and coaches with strategies to measure coaching effectiveness and build high-performing teams. Packed with immediately applicable tools and real-world case studies, Maximizing Organizational Performance bridges theory and practice, offering insights that resonate in today’s complex business environment.
So don’t let your organization fall behind. Unlock its full potential and prepare for the future with this essential resource!
Radicle Growth: Transform into an Unstoppable Leader through Mastering the Art of Questions
Radicle Growth is all about flipping the script on leadership. Dave Reynolds argues that the best bosses aren’t the ones with all the answers; they’re the ones with all the right questions. He shares a coaching framework rooted in asking purposeful questions to help employees grow into problem-solvers and leaders themselves. The book is part how-to, part mindset shift, and full of stories and analogies that make it stick. From managing up, down, and across to creating systems that build accountability, Reynolds wants you to stop managing and start coaching.
I dove into this book expecting another corporate pep talk with catchy buzzwords and vague advice. What I got instead was something surprisingly personal and kind of refreshing. Reynolds opens with a simple question he poses to new managers: “Who was your toughest boss?” and then follows it up with, “Who was your best boss?” The aha moment is that they’re often the same person. That cracked me open a bit. It’s so real. We remember the ones who pushed us because they made us better. I loved how Reynolds used this to frame the rest of the book. It sets the tone: this isn’t about making people feel good all the time; it’s about helping them grow. And sometimes growth feels like friction.
One of my favorite parts was the “don’t feed the ducks” story. Reynolds shares an anecdote about a high-performing salesperson who regularly handed off his leads to underperforming teammates. At first glance, this might seem generous or even admirable. However, Reynolds reframes the situation, revealing that such behavior fosters dependence rather than growth. He points out that the guy was actually creating dependency and hurting everyone’s growth in the long run. That’s what coaching solves. You guide people to find their own fish instead of tossing them one. This idea stuck with me. Reynolds makes it clear that it’s a short-term win and a long-term loss.
I also appreciated that Reynolds didn’t try to be some untouchable guru. He admits he learned all this the hard way, first in telecom, then across industries. The anecdote involving Reynolds offering impromptu coaching to a banking executive during an NHL game stands out as particularly impactful. It’s not about having all the technical knowledge; it’s about knowing how to ask questions that spark clarity. The idea that the less you know, the more you can help blew my mind. It reframes the whole idea of expertise.
Radicle Growth is less of a manual and more of a mindset shift. It’s a book for anyone in a leadership role who feels like they’re constantly stuck in the weeds, answering questions, solving problems, never really freeing up their time or developing their people. If you’ve ever felt like you’re just putting out fires instead of building something lasting, this book is for you. It’s great for managers, coaches, and even parents. Anyone who wants to learn how to lead with intention, not just authority.
Pages: 172 | ASIN : B0DWYQ7HDK
Engage. Coach. Develop.: Building Strong Relationships That Drive Individual and Team Performance
Artell Smith’s Engage. Coach. Develop. is a no-nonsense, practical guide for anyone in a leadership position who wants to build meaningful relationships with their employees. The book revolves around a simple yet powerful framework: engaging employees to build trust, coaching them to improve performance, and developing them for long-term success. Smith blends research-backed insights with personal anecdotes, creating an informative and relatable book. He doesn’t just throw theories at you; he shows you how to implement them in real-world scenarios, making this book a valuable read for managers at any level.
One of the book’s strongest aspects is its focus on real engagement, not just the corporate buzzword kind, but actual, meaningful interactions. Smith points out that engagement isn’t a one-time event; it’s an ongoing process that requires genuine interest in employees as people. The chapter “How to Engineer Engaging Experiences” lays this out beautifully, with practical tips on how to create consistent, positive interactions. He gives examples of small but impactful gestures, like remembering personal details or simply asking thoughtful questions, that can turn a routine conversation into a trust-building moment. It’s clear that Smith understands the power of human connection, and he makes a compelling argument that good management starts with authentic engagement.
Smith doesn’t just tell you to coach employees; he walks you through the mindset and habits of a great coach. He highlights the importance of emotional intelligence, curiosity, and adaptability, illustrating these ideas with personal stories. One particularly memorable example involves a leader named Butler, with whom Smith initially struggled to connect. Instead of forcing his own approach, Smith took the time to understand Butler’s perspective, eventually turning what could have been a contentious relationship into a highly effective partnership.
The final pillar, development, is where the book takes a more strategic turn. Smith argues that true leadership isn’t about keeping employees in their current roles but preparing them for future opportunities. He challenges managers to create intentional development plans, provide meaningful stretch assignments, and advocate for their people. The example of Damien, an overlooked employee who was given the chance to grow and ultimately thrive, drives this point home. It’s refreshing to see a leadership book that doesn’t just focus on short-term performance but also emphasizes long-term career growth.
Smith writes in a clear, conversational style that feels more like getting advice from a seasoned mentor than reading a business textbook. The book is especially valuable for new managers who need a straightforward guide on how to build strong relationships with their teams. But even experienced leaders will find nuggets of wisdom to refine their approach. If you want to be the kind of manager who employees respect, trust, and genuinely want to work with, Engage. Coach. Develop. is well worth your time.
Pages: 96 | ASIN : B0CKQ6D2P1
