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4.5
This book's primary audience is evangelical Christian pastors with an additional audience of Christians who serve or wish to serve in leadership positions in their churches, businesses and families. If you are of a strongly secular mindset, the book's thesis that God works in the world today will seem naïve or alien to you and I suspect that you will have difficulty accepting, let alone absorbing, the principal message of the book.The book examines a very wide range of leaders, both Christian and non-Christian, including Lee Iacocca, Napoleon, Henry VIII, Abraham Lincoln and Dwight L. Moody, for example. The authors focus on leadership in churches, businesses and families, but does not look intently at leadership in the realm of political campaigns and looks at political governance only at a high level. The book provides practical guidance on the challenges of leading, and sometimes failing, in churches, businesses and families. Financial gain, ego needs and sexual improprieties may, and do, adversely impact Christian leaders. How some, Billy Graham for instance, have avoided these downfalls are reviewed in the book. The book offers advice on team building and managing one's schedule to focus on the important matters, which includes the leader's family, which sometimes are not the most urgent.The book offers a great deal of practical advice on many aspects of leadership. The book is well written, but it isn't particularly short. If avoids the usual business book failure of providing one insight that takes 20-30 pages and then repeating that insight 5 or 6 times to have a book. You will need to engage the book to realize its message. God works on earth through humans and humans need leaders. Leaders face special challenges and the Blackabys offer scholarly insight on what makes effective leaders for God's work. I recommend the book.
