All the Way to the Top
Exceptional in its depth, this is a business book with particular relevance.
Jesse Calloway’s All the Way to the Top is an in-depth study of business leadership from an operational perspective.
Books about business leadership are almost uniformly “light” in the sense that they mostly offer strategic platitudes but few implementation guidelines. Calloway, an executive coach and former operations executive, takes the opposite approach, providing a leadership playbook that is comprehensive and textbook-like.
The book begins with an overview of leadership, which includes a solid definition, a brief explanation of leadership models, a discussion of “leadership levers” (teams, feedback, and coaching), emotional aspects of leadership, leadership credibility, and leadership psychology and behavior. The author presents all of this information in a single chapter that is peppered with numerous scholarly references, suggesting that he not only painstakingly researched the topic but also provided a strong, supportable platform for the material. The second chapter, concerning performance appraisals, is equally detailed.
The remainder of the book moves from the theoretical to the practical. Calloway creates a simulated corporation, “Summit Consumables Incorporated,” in order to demonstrate leadership from the viewpoint of different management areas. The manner in which the author describes the fictional company is quite impressive: Calloway provides a financial snapshot and an organization chart and, even more remarkably, plays out the backgrounds and roles of seven specific employees who work at the firm’s Georgia facility. He then introduces a process he calls the “5C LIM” (5C=conversation, calculation, collaboration, communication, and cognizance; LIM=Leadership Improvement Model). Calloway walks through the conceptual operation of the 5C LIM and then demonstrates specifically how it can be applied by each of the employees to improve their own leadership.
“Jessica Wright,” for example, is “the director of manufacturing operations.” Jessica’s credentials and tenure at Summit Consumables are fully described, as are her organization structure and job responsibilities. In a chapter that is essentially a highly detailed, step-by-step road map, Jessica is seen utilizing the components of the 5C LIM. Along the way, the inner workings of her organization are exposed, her objectives are explored, and the measurable results of her efforts are discussed.
This same approach is cleverly employed to show how each of five other employees (a senior buying analyst, a regional sales director, a regional product portfolio director, an IT manager, and a regional call center manager) applies the 5C LIM. A summary chapter reviews how employees use various aspects of the 5C LIM. Another chapter, concerning how to make effective presentations, should prove particularly valuable, even to those who do not pursue the 5C LIM method.
For some, the level of sophistication of the writing and the detailed, extensive nature of the content may prove to be somewhat overwhelming. Still, as a leadership manual for teaching MBA students or a guidebook for business leaders who want their executives to excel, All the Way to the Top should be ideal.
All in all, All the Way to the Top is exceptional in its depth and its illustration of a methodology that aims to have a measurable impact on leadership improvement. The book is particularly relevant for those who work in the manufacturing sector, but it should prove just as valuable to leaders in any type of business.
Reviewed by
Barry Silverstein
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
