The Bottom Line
Contains interesting, sometimes unusual, insights into the process of developing leaders and successful organizations.
Pros
- Each historical excerpt is followed by lessons that contemporary readers should draw from it.
- Well-written and informative.
- Well-executed blend of a management self-help book and historical writing.
- The author is both a successful investment banker and steeped in the culture of the Jesuit order.
Cons
- May not appeal to people who are completely uninterested in religious history.
Description
- Case studies in effective leadership and organizational design drawn from the history of an influential religious order.
- Combines a management self-help book with a series of historical narratives.
- The author, successful in the world of finance, also is steeped in the culture of the religious order in question.
Guide Review - Heroic Leadership
What can a religious order founded in 1540 teach us about shaping winning organizations today, including for-profit businesses? Apparently a great deal, according to the author.
The order in question is the Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuits. Author Chris Lowney is Jesuit-educated, a former novice in the order, and later a managing director in the investment banking division of J.P. Morgan.
Lowney describes how the Jesuit approach to leadership stands on four pillars:
- Self-awareness, or understanding one's strengths and weaknesses
- Ingenuity in responding to new challenges and situations
- Love, or making others' needs paramount
- Heroism, or taking personal risks to achieve broader aims
Lowney presents a variety of fascinating stories from the Jesuits' early history to illustrate their organizational theories and methods. Among the most compelling is how several members of the order became key advisers to a Chinese emperor. In this vein, a thread that runs throughout the narrative is the Jesuits' cultural sensitivity, doing all they can to understand the language and customs of a land in order to engage more fruitfully with its inhabitants.
Among his interesting insights is how the Jesuit order rejected the notion of charismatic, centralized leadership from the start, opting instead for a decentralized structure that promotes individual initiative on the part of its members. This approach, in turn, rests on the theory that all members of the order can be shaped into leaders of one sort or another.
