A Review by Mike Woodruff and Daniel McAfee
Next week I’m attending a gathering entitled Listening to Wisdom / Hearing the Voices of Our Great Cloud of Witnesses, which is being hosted by two foundations out West. My assignment included some reading and one book review. Daniel McAfee helped me with this project. Below is our review.
We need to pay attention to who is doing it well, and by it I mean, whatever we hope to do better. For more than a decade, Michael Lindsay – the President of Gordon College – has been paying attention to senior leadership in influential organizations.
In View from the Top: An Inside Look at How People in Power See and Shape the World, he shares the insights he’s gathered from interviewing 550 men and women who are leading at the highest levels of business, government, and the nonprofit world. This book is a synthesis of his understanding of how personal traits, motivations, values, experiences and practices led certain men and women to positions of significant influence. It is organized around seven observations and reaches a handful of conclusions about leadership in the present moment.
We rank the take-home value of Lindsay’s work into three categories:
- Level One: Some of what Lindsey shares are well-established truths. It’s not surprising to see that the best leaders love what they do, maintain a diverse network of friends or that they lead from relationships (not positional authority). It may be helpful to be reminded of these things, but these are well-trafficked truths.
- Level Two: Of greater value are his observations that twist conventional wisdom: Institutions drive real change, so the best leaders may act personally, but they think institutionally; it does not matter what leaders do before there are twenty; a privileged childhood and an Ivy League education are not required to reach senior leadership positions, but growing up in a large city appears to help; the toll of leadership is higher for women than for men; and the privileged lifestyle of elite leaders creates distance from ordinary constituents and consumers. Executive compensation is a major contributor to that distance.
- Level Three: For us, the biggest value of Lindsay’s work continues to pivot around his twin contentions that: 1) there are elite networks – and mentors moving within them – that leapfrog some people to the front of the line; and 2) most evangelicals are not only not participating in these networks, they are unaware they exist.