The Student Leadership Challenge
By Barry Posner and James Kouzes
A little while back I had to read this book for work in order to understand the processes adopted for student leadership development. The introduction itself and the introductory paragraphs were great at explaining what the five proposed practices are like, but a large portion of the book is just case studies of student success stories – a waste of paper if you’d ask me.
It just showed how students succeeded in their goals by identifying the traits and processes used in the case studies, but the book doesn’t provide a useful step-by-step or a qualitative analysis of what was common between those cases. It shows that initiative can be turned into success, but not how one’s personality can change to become an effective leader.
Perhaps it was a mismatch between my expectations from a book written by two highly-acclaimed scholars and my actual perception of the value I obtained out of it. To some its intriguing, to others its boring. If I knew what I was getting into, I’d choose any of Weber’s longwinded lectures over this.
