Veteran Led
Military Leadership Lessons to Help Your Team Survive, Thrive, and Dominate
Military strategies and practices translate to stellar leadership skills, claims Veteran Led, an incisive leadership guide.
Army officer John S. Berry’s informative business book Veteran Led applies lessons learned in the military to the business and legal worlds.
With guidance on surviving, thriving, and dominating in professional realms, the book draws upon military strategies and practices that are said to translate to stellar leadership skills. There’s guidance on overcoming difficulties and attaining success; the book stresses values like being able to distinguish between risks and calculated risks to model practical leadership. It also includes instructions for assembling and leading successful teams alongside its coverage of factors including courage, situational awareness, risk assessments, and the buddy system.
Drawing upon its central conceit, the book addresses aspects of military life to complement its advice. It discusses marching cadence, inspections, and the army injunction to “hurry up and wait,” mining them for useful rules applicable to any endeavor. The chapter summaries are used to reiterate related lessons. Berry’s deployments to Iraq and Bosnia also proffer lessons; he repeats the military mantra “adapt, improvise, and overcome” to address challenges like limited resources and to encourage resourcefulness. Medical breakthroughs borne of battlefield necessity are also used to illustrate the book’s points, with tourniquets, penicillin, and anesthesia held up as proof of the wisdom of its principles. Humorous observations poke through such aggrandizing, as with the note that veterans cringe when ads claim that an item is military grade, their minds translating this to “made by the lowest bidder.”
Applying a military perspective to all endeavors, the book is filled with intriguing insights, as on how meetings with vendors begin on transactional notes before “their highly trained sales professional listens to your problem and then, magically, their product or service is the only logical solution. Lucky you!” But some of its assertions pit military approaches against business world approaches to a credibility-compromising degree, as when it contends that employee evaluations in the army are grounded in tangible specifics instead of the subjective impressions that it suggests organizational leaders preference. Generalizations undergird such claims, undermining the persuasiveness of the book’s analyses. Oversimplifications also plague its treatments of topics such as lucky versus unlucky people. And all feeds into the ultimate case that veterans already know all they need to in order to unlock success, rendering the text more rousing for those looking to transition from the military to civilian life than for those without those experiences.
An incisive leadership guide, Veteran Led translates the fundamentals of military leadership into hallmarks of professional success.
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.
