Lead and Succeed
Proven Strategies to Develop and Enhance Leadership Skills for Recent Graduates and Early Career Professionals
Its advice brought to life via vulnerable personal examples, Lead and Succeed is a concise self-development guide with recommendations for becoming a successful leader.
University president Scott Cowen’s insightful leadership guide Lead and Succeed is for college students who are learning how to be leaders.
Its prose warm, the book gathers unembellished thematic lessons about hard work, introspection, and open-mindedness. Made up of informative, candid chapters, this concise text covers topics including emergent leadership, resilience, and vulnerability with clarity. References to Harvard Business Review articles and other outside resources support its advice, as in a discussion on resilience where the book points to an outside article claiming that a good leader recognizes the need to recharge and not just endure during times of challenge.
Cowen, who served as a university president during both Hurricane Katrina and pandemic lockdowns, discusses the key leadership skills he learned in the course of those tough experiences. His book mixes personal vignettes with reflections on leadership responses during the crises, as with Tulane responding to New Orleans’s posthurricane recovery efforts in part by adding a community service requirement for its students. And to support the idea that leadership requires work and humility, the book references a “meet the moment” approach Cowen took during COVID-19, composing vulnerable biweekly emails to his collegiate community to share his experiences of loss and mental health struggles and to instill a sense of safety through transparency.
Indeed, the book is threaded through with Cowen’s stories, complementing its encouragements to reflect on one’s personal history in order to become a successful leader. And though much of the book draws from examples in higher education, it does so with broad applicability. For instance, a leadership anecdote is sparked by the question of which five people might make an invite list for a hypothetical dinner, holding up as ideal companions those who are forthcoming with their opinions and ideas in order to disrupt the status quo. “Choose curiosity over judgment in the name of positive disruption,” the book suggests, reinforcing the theme of keeping an open mind. And the text also has an interactive element: Its writing prompts encourage introspection on one’s leadership traits, as with “What does ‘showing up’ and ‘stepping up’ look like,” followed by correlating action prompts, such as to choose a step to take toward one’s goals in the moment. These features are brief, with a half page of space attached to each for precise reflection.
A succinct leadership guide, Lead and Succeed shares advice for honing one’s leadership skills.
Reviewed by
Katy Keffer
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.
