Book Review Leadership Beyond Reason: How Great Leaders Succeed by Harnessing the Power of Their Values, Feelings, and Intuition

by Dr. John Townsend

This is a strange book. I would title it as “Leaders’ Therapy Counseling 101, Without the Counselor”. The book doesn’t really have an underlying philosophy—it doesn’t really advocate a point of view, other than “know thyself” in non-reason ways. This non-philosophy feels like talking with a counselor—the counselor is usually very agreeable and understanding and non- judgmental (initially without a philosophy) and tries to get the patient to discover the truth himself. Standard non-fiction writing style doesn’t work well on these self-discovery questions. Plato’s style of dialogues with Socrates asking a lot of questions is the writing desirable.

For example, the book starts with talking about values, but it doesn’t advocate any particular value, and instead goes through cases where a leader has to clarify his value. The problem is that whereas in counseling, the counselor uses many years of experience to ask questions and help the leader-patient define his values and resolve value conflicts, the book itself is very difficult for the reader himself to read through the approximately 30 pages of authors’ writing on values, to determine where the reader’s own value system is failing. Socratic questions writing would work better.

The next section deals with thoughts. Thoughts are discussed by religion and philosophy leaders and can be very complicated. The author here reduces it to 30 pages with lots of case examples that are difficult to apply. Similarly for the sections on Emotions, Relationships, and Transformation.

The challenge of this book: Value, Thought, Emotion, Relationship, and Transformation—can it be done in 180 pages? Can self-understanding be taught so briefly? Unlikely—a quality counselor is far better. Again, I think a title “Leaders’ Therapy Counseling 101, Without the Counselor” is appropriate. The one positive with this book is that its examples involve leaders, unlike many other psychology books that focus regular individuals. However, the topics this book covers are much better suited in and better reading in religion books such as Yoga Sutras of Patanjali or Bhagavad Gita or Buddhist introductory books.