Dare to Lead!: Uncommon Sense and Unconventional Wisdom from 50 Top Ceos

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Summary: Dare to Lead! - An excellent read, highly recommended
Review:
Dare to Lead! is exactly what I was looking for. All the essential lessons from actual business leaders packed into one book. No theoretic nonsense from someone who never led anyone, but a valuable collection of the essential factors that allowed 50 real leaders to beat their competition and to successfully drive their business. A great reference for anyone in business looking for swift inspiration! I highly recommend it!

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Summary: Key Strategy and Management Principles from Noteworthy CEOs
Review: Dare to Lead! will be of most value to a CEO who is new to an organization or who is starting up a company. Those who want to become CEOs in the future would also do well to read this book.

Mr. Merrill read about a number of successful entrepreneurs and succeeded in interviewing a number of them. He clustered the lessons that the CEOs described about themselves into 18 principles which are each exemplified by 3-4 brief stories. The most interesting stories came from JetBlue, Boston Beer Company, Google, 99 Cents Only, Panera Bread, Columbia Sportswear, Trader Joe's, JOE BOXER, and Medtronic. The stories are the best part of the book. The chapters don't offer much guidance aside from what is contained in the stories. Several of the stories were new to me, and I found them to be interesting and helpful.

Here are some of the key lessons in the book: Set a good example; pursue strategies that take you around obstacles; pursue your idea to its logical limit; look for good ideas that can be transferred from other industries; concentrate your focus on what you do best and do it better; repeat and build on success; use innovative promotions to attract partners and customers; listen to and observe customers; have senior management handle customer complaints; focus on what you can do today to make progress; put your employees and customers ahead of your profits; let employees solve problems; help your customers sell to their customers; work more closely with outside partners; and make your company's purpose and values seem more real to your employees and customers.

As you can see, none of these principles are new. They are a good antidote to much of the overly analytical education that new MBAs receive. New MBAs won't probably want to read this book, but they should.

The book would have benefited from sharing fewer lessons and doing so in more detail . . . along with more advice on how to follow through in these areas.

The writing is smooth and easy to follow. You'll find yourself finishing the book in one or two airplane trips. Take it along on your next JetBlue flight!

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Summary: A "Must Read" for Innovative Business Competitors
Review: I commonly read leadership books with an expectation to learn new methodologies for influencing team members in manner to meet common goals and objectives. To date, there are only two books I've read that paint tactical and strategic scenarios with an aim to demonstrate the ever changing matrix of today's business topology; Tom Wheeler's "Take Command {Leadership Lessons from the Civil War}" and now Mike Merrill's "Dare To Lead".

This book is not a laborious study of leadership methods, or technical approaches. Rather, it's a journey that puts you in the mind of proven business leaders that have been forced off of the common path to capture and maintain success. This collection of unique experiences across multiple industries, demonstrates the value of leaders who have the conviction and character to pursue their innovative beliefs requiring committed decisions in the absence of popular buy-in and abundant resources.

If you don't read something in this book that finds you excited to be navigating outside the box of common process, you are either a billionaire, or not in the business of nurturing a bottom line.

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Summary: Dare to Lead: thought provoking and fast paced
Review: I'm always so hopeful when I start a business book that there will be real "meat"; information of value that can be internalized and used in my own working life. Mr. Merrill crafted a fast paced book broken into small bite-sized chunks that makes it easy to grasp and a joy to plow through. More important, he brings to life a wide variety of business examples that we are all familiar with (or thought we were), in order to make a point. It's a quick read that is full of food for thought.

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Summary: Review of DARE TO LEAD!, by Mike Merrill
Review: Review of "DARE TO LEAD!"
Author: Mike Merrill, published by Career Press

Talk about mindsets! When the reviewer, having a military background, was asked to comment on this work, knowing that the author was a second generation West Pointer, said reviewer automatically presumed that the book was going to be about some aspect of military leadership.

Wrong!

However, there are some commonalities, in that the brand of leadership that the Military Academy teaches translates into `getting down into the trenches with your troops', and this book gives concrete examples early on of that type of leadership practiced by men and women who thought `outside the box', who acted as ticket agents and as members of cleaning crews for failing airlines, as well as for `start-up' air lines; for successful entrepreneurs who were cooks for their own businesses.

Although relatively small - not the size of a `full sized' book and less than 225 pages - this is an extremely well researched and documented work, indicating many, many hours of painstaking research, countless interviews, etc.

There are a few central themes running throughout the book. One is "change". This book is composed of relatively short vignettes covering a wide range of businesses, mostly but not all, small ones, several of which were on the brink of failure and needed `change' to survive, to prosper.

It is also about "people", people who were not averse to getting their hands dirty, not afraid to ask for advice from others more successful than they, men and women who - one has to read between the lines to see this - put in horrendously long hours, who lived literally hand-to-mouth, in some cases for years, in order to succeed.

Another theme is "persistence". Few if any of the entrepreneurial folks featured in this book had instant, `flash-in-the-pan' ideas. Almost without exception they were in a sink or swim situation; a change had to be made, creditors, investors had to be convinced, as well as entrenched bureaucracies in some cases. This takes patience, persistence, and leadership.

Still another is "guts", the intestinal fortitude required to take an idea that one believes in and push it - often in the face of opposition, the specter of failure, until the idea is proven to work.

The book is well written, sometimes in the first person, indicating in-depth knowledge of the problems, which is accurate, since the author has been CEO of at least two firms.

Another trait common to military leadership that the book evokes is "Take care of your people and they will take care of you".

How often do we see situations today where upper management takes care of themselves to the exclusion of the people, the employees whose hard work, loyalty has put these managers where they are?

This is a highly recommended work, an excellent and enjoyable read!

Reviewed by Thomas W. Leo, CPP, USMA 1959




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Summary: 223 Pages of PROVEN Business Ideas
Review: This book is a steal. I've read more than a hundred of the best general business books and yet Merrill's book managed to stand out among them. Merrill's teachings are sound and proven. His writing is fluent, clear and concise. His observations of successful business practices are rewarding for the reader - intellectually and financially. As Mae West said, "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful." Anyone interested in business who doesn't read Dare to Lead is making a big mistake. I highly recommend this book.