Intelligent Leadership

Intelligent Leadership, What You Need To Know To Unlock Your Full Potential, by John Mattone, Amacom 2013

I love enneagrams they are great fun and always produce surprises, and this book offers enneagrams dedicated specifically to leadership! Mattone's 

enneagram section contains the nine points you’ll need to analyze and develop your own leadership growth and potential:

1. Perfectionists

2. Helpers

3. Entertainers

4. Artists

5. Thinkers

6. Disciples

7. Activists

8. Drivers, and 

9. Arbitrators

This book is not a study of what makes great leaders great, it is

Instead more a self-help toolbox that allows the reader to privately analyze and reflect on how to become more of a leader. Not everybody wants

to be Jack Welch but every employee can increase his or her

flexibility and self-determination by understanding how an organization needs

and uses leadership.

It's always easy to start with the negative and build from there, and Mattone picks two doozies: Scott Thompson of Yahoo, who one day was

holding a one-million dollar salary plus $5.5M in stock options and the next day was asked by his Board to resign because of a misstatement on his résumé 

that claimed he was an early 80s graduate of Stonehill College. 

Or take Dennis Kozlowski, the Tyco CEO whose toga parties and other videoed amusements are still talked about. Despite all the safeguards and regulations 

on top of dedicated accounting positions Kozlowski used Tyco assets as if they were his own ATM card. Mattone warns that "character doesn't determine your destiny it determines your ultimate destiny.”

Once the reader has identified his own leadership style, it's time per the enneagram to look deeper into the details of what to expect from someone whose 

personality profile includes, for an example, a heavy dose of the Thinker.  If you are a Thinker type, your co-workers might expect you to be on a bad day 

reclusive, secretive and self-contained, not the most useful characteristics one would want to be remembered for. But if these traits are the ONLY remarkable statements that follow you around Mattone offers a dead-on "Awareness Exercise, Building up your thinker trait."  Here the reader will be taken through a series of self-examination steps, reflections, conclusions, and next steps that put amazingly complex or puzzling events into clear, connectable sequences.  

·         Provide a leadership example in which you exhibited immature/derailleur Thinker traits

·        Thinking back on this situation, what were the consequences of your immature actions?  What happened?

·        When you acted immaturely, please describe in vivid detail the thoughts and feelings you experienced prior to taking the action you did.

·        Based on what you have read in this book and you reflecting on this situation, write a brief summary of how your thoughts, emotions, actions, 

and results were connected.

·        If this situation were to present itself again, what end results would you desire

·        To achieve this new desired result, please indicate the actions and strategies you would take to ensure that the new desired end result would be 

achieved.

·        To execute these actions and steps, what thoughts and emotions would need to be in place in order to support your positive actions?

·        After executing your new plan/strategy, what results were achieved and what did you learn?

Along the way the reader is provided with good and bad examples, as well as to hints as to how to shift from a potentially bad outcome.  This is the kind of 

book we could have needed by ignored in our twenties, and relied on in the rest of our career!

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