Jay Sullivan

Communications form an essential skill of leadership. To be a leader, people have to follow you. For people to follow you, they first must appreciate your vision, articulated in words, and then see them followed up with actions. This is true both in the workplace and in social life. In this book, Jay Sullivan aims to provide practical and simple insights to help us achieve these goals.

In the first half of the book, Sullivan’s instruction on good writing and good speaking are fairly par for the course. He wisely reinforces that he merely provides ways to improve effectiveness, not rules to follow precisely. Most of his adages correspond with succinct communication styles that relate to the people around you. This style resembles advice in many popular books. He aims to get your focus off of you and on to your audience – that is, the people that you are leading.

This book’s first half is fairly standard, but the second half clearly outdoes the first. Sullivan’s focus narrows on management and leadership. The theme of getting the focus onto the people becomes stronger and more powerful. He reminds us that we lead people for the people’s benefit first, not our own. Thus, his expressed style resembles that of servant leadership. Obviously, most of us fall short of this ideal, but I appreciate being pushed in the right direction. I’d therefore suggest that this book’s strengths are less about how to communicate more succinctly at work and more about communicating more effectively as a leader.

Public life requires communication. Those who aspire to leadership roles often need some refinement before they grow their tribe of followers. It’s better to identify how to improve comfortably through reading than to learn through painful mistakes. This book aims to ease readers’ adaptations to this end. Modern life certainly needs less self-absorbed leaders and more who are interested in the common good. This book can help us all reach those noble aims more directly.… (mer)