Book Review: The Leader’s Tool Kit
Posted By Aaron Marcelli on November 2, 2009
So if you follow the “What I’m Reading” section of this blog, you may have noticed that the cover of Cy Charney’s The Leader’s Tool Kit was posted for quite some time. I do admit it took me basically the entire summer to work through this book. Grant it, I have the bad habit of reading through more than one book at a time. While reading the tool kit, I was also in and out of The Truth War by John MacArthur and Jesus was a Liberal by Jerry Wilde, neither of which would I highly recommend.
I have expressed on here my desire to become a better leader. It makes perfect sense then that I would be drawn to a book that’s title promises to provide hundreds of tips and techniques for developing leadership skills. If the book had been what it promised, it would not have taken me parts of four months to finish.
The pages of Charney’s book do list many, many tidbits of advice spanning a load of situations, work circumstances, and industry demands. The problem is that it covers such a broad range of topics and possibilities it never dives deep enough in any one area to be much of a helpful source. The introduction promises to build you into a great leader and equip you in dealing with most leadership issues; a commitment it could never fully meet. Though the book is loaded with short suggestions, it mainly focuses on the what of leadership, never helping with the why or even how.
I was told before that leadership is simple, and that statement alone simplified things for me. Charney would leave you thinking leadership is extremely difficult and you must have a separate set of leadership tools in place according to what situations arise.
I must learn to put down a bad book rather than drudge through it on the hope it will get better. In no way do I have it all down when it comes to leadership, as a matter of fact I’m still thirsty to learn, so in no way is my negative review of this work based on claiming superior understanding of the topic at hand. I would just direct you elsewhere if you are going to be looking to paper to develop your leadership abilities.
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