Beyond the Hammer
A Fresh Approach to Leadership, Culture, and Building High Performance Teams
An embattled man learns how to navigate fresh personal and professional struggles thanks to a generous mentor in Beyond the Hammer, a profound book about leadership.
Brian Gottlieb’s superb leadership guide Beyond the Hammer uses an inspirational narrative to impart enduring lessons about company culture, team building, and management.
In the book’s allegorical first half, George, the embattled owner of a remodeling company inherited from his father, finds his new work venture to be plagued with failures. He faces struggles at home, too, including guilt over his divorce and parenting issues. The mounting crises threaten to destroy his company: his employees are jumping ship to a competitor, projects are being botched, customers are furious, and George’s twenty-year-old daughter, Amelia, is coasting along as the company’s taciturn social media manager.
A chance encounter with Marty, a charismatic business leader who’s the president of a larger construction company, leads to a desperate mentorship meeting that transforms into an extended period of coaching and a lasting friendship. And in the book’s second half, the countless business lessons woven into George’s story are sifted out, analyzed, and developed into a schematic, multipart process fit for practical application.
George’s story combines acute psychological understandings with dramatizations of business lessons to persuasive effect. In it, simple maxims are elevated via dynamic scenes as George integrates Marty’s core ideas (including “belief is transferable” and “leaders are aware of the echo of their voice”) into his everyday tasks: during a team meeting, he scraps an AI-generated company mission statement in order to create a collaborative space for team members to take ownership of the company’s mission. And the second half of the book refines the applicability of Marty’s principles even more, dedicating a single chapter to each of his five pillars of leadership. It moves backward from the holistic perspective in George’s narrative to a granular, guided examination of what goes into the five pillars.
As a whole, the book is savvy about combining theory with inviting storytelling. It defines amorphous terms like “belief” and “culture” with clarity and forwards management techniques and templates for daily challenges in an inviting manner. Generous and attentive, its step-by-step leadership model benefits from precise technical descriptions as well as detailed graphs, lists, and organizational tools.
A stunning leadership guide, Beyond the Hammer articulates an inspiring set of values for business and life through its illustrative story of a man at a professional crossroads.
Reviewed by
Willem Marx
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.
