Lift
Fostering the Leader in You amid Revolutionary Global Change
- 2022 INDIES Finalist
- Finalist, Business & Economics (Adult Nonfiction)
Lift is an optimistic work that encourages leaders to depend on their personal resilience and social awareness when it comes to charting their organizations’ next steps.
Faisal Hoque’s encouraging leadership book Lift looks for contemporary opportunities to make a difference through one’s business choices.
Confronting realities like climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic, this book is about empathetic transformations to the ways that people work. It seeks to effect change on a wide social level via everyday decisions, asserting that “meaningful leadership is becoming even more essential.” It also provides the tools to nurture emotional intelligence and collaborative skills, arguing that effective leaders provide both, as well as engaging in experiential learning.
Working across three progressive sections, the book starts by outlining global challenges, showing that wishful thinking is not sufficient for confronting such contemporary upheavals. It covers topics like the fourth industrial revolution and the spread of misinformation in a swift manner, though, condensing each to provide a summary of their weighty implications. The book then explores the importance of empowering individuals to effect change in areas including health care and education; a wide range of perspectives and interests are represented in this work.
Broad descriptions of what transformational leadership entails follow this groundwork. The book suggests that consumers have unprecedented power for influencing how governments and businesses operate: now, more than ever, Hoque says that “the end-user … wields the capacity and influence to impact and transform” the world. Examples of changes, as in the medical field with the use of patient portals, flesh this work out.
The book’s reliance on real-world examples vivifies its ideals about transformational leadership, which involves making meaning for the people whom one serves. Each section includes effective anecdotes of both transformational leadership in action, or of the consequences of evading it, as with the story of a CEO who refused to learn new communication methods (like Zoom), and who was replaced by their board of directors in response. These tales show that changes that seem to be personal are actually the outward effects of more monumental changes to society.
Linking big concepts, as of the advent of artificial intelligence, big data, and new technologies, to everyday decisions, the book ably captures massive social shifts; and it presents related challenges as opportunities, rather than as road blocks. Indeed, this is a leadership book well suited to those who see the potential in remote work, Zoom meetings, and other responsive technological advancements. Hoque supports all of his claims with clear end notes, citing relevant research from places like Stanford and Pew. Closing advice for developing one’s potential to lead others caps this convincing leadership text.
Lift is an optimistic work that encourages leaders to depend on personal resilience and social awareness when it comes to charting their organizations’ next steps.
Reviewed by
Jeremiah Rood
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.
