Thinking Outside the Boss
The Four Uncommon Leadership Principles to Equip Your People and Build Your Organization
An empathetic leadership guide, Thinking Outside the Boss covers the fundamentals necessary to keep employees happy, generate productivity, and ensure organization-wide trust and engagement.
Construction firm entrepreneur Oskhar Pineda’s humane leadership guide Thinking Outside the Boss is about empowering employees to thrive.
Taking as its guiding principles vulnerability, communication, trust, and mission, this book covers the fundamentals necessary to keep employees happy, generate productivity, and ensure organization-wide trust and engagement. It introduces a framework for “relatable, trust-based, human-to-human leadership” that stands to be more profitable than traditional models. Its four sections are subdivided to parse topics into their core components: Communication is about listening to understand, keeping the conversation flowing, and examining ideas in full.
Pineda’s experiences are used as examples. He recalls dealing with financial disputes, structural collapses, and common construction issues, mining broad lessons from these anecdotes, including that clear mission statements enable employees to help build their companies up. Stories about Pineda’s personal life flesh the book out further, as with references to school, vacation, and parenting. These make the text more personable, and its direct addresses have a cozy quality as well.
Outside examples are included as well, adding breadth: A packaging manufacturer that recognizes its top performers with ceremonies and perks is referenced to support the importance of affirmations, which the book notes can be as simple as a “Good job.” Familiar examples from the business world are included too, as of how Girls Who Code became esteemed as a nonprofit employer or of how BP failed at communications during the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Iconoclastic in tone, the book often positions itself against the conventional wisdom, for instance using an artificial intelligence–generated mission statement to distinguish between generic marketing-speak and actual animating purpose. It often criticizes top-down leadership, contrasting the rigidity of the traditional chain of command with leading by example according to a lighthouse model in which a leader serves as a “clear, visible point of reference.” With regularity, it deflates leader-as-hero and boss-knows-best notions, less to cast aspersions than to draw distinctions with its own “uncommon” approach.
Conversational writing distills big-picture observations, such as how leadership is more about understanding people than the corporate techniques of modern business. Some phrases repeat to excess, including “clarity of mission” and “open communication.” Results from outside studies and surveys also add credence to the book’s points, while its subheadings, bullet-point lists, and useful footnotes make it useful as a reference text. Its frequent pull quotes, text emphasized with bold and italics, and graphics result in busy pages, though. Still, the book fleshes out its vision of “competent humility” well, laying forth the fundamentals of trusting, nonhierarchical leadership as an alternative to traditional, transactional leadership.
The encouraging leadership guide Thinking Outside the Boss suggests putting one’s employees first to achieve organization-wide results.
Reviewed by
Joseph S. Pete
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.
