Not much to say here, I will just write down the few notes I have about this book:

Here are my raw notes about the book:

All employees are humans too. Keep this in mind.
A good leader looks for someone to be in his place when he retires.
He thinks about the employee interests.
Being a leader is about being helpful
A good leader creates an inclusive system where employees feel part of the system.

A different perspective of a leader. Leadership objective is to improve people, have them achieve their highest potential. The foundation narrative is the we live in an environment of continual change, and leadership mission is to help people succeed through those changes.

Anecdotal business memoir with story telling. Mostly common sense conclusions.

A quick read with many points to ponder. I was particularly drawn to Max de Pree’s idea of leading to completeness, where “completeness” isn’t just reaching your goal, but planning the growth of the organization after the success of reaching that goal. This growth, as told throughout the book, is a holistic growth. It has as much to do with profits and margins as it does with the growth of your employees and peers. His assertions of trust being the key to unlocking individual growth was encouraging to read, especially in the context of business, where, he adds, sometimes strictly relies on hierarchy instead of trust. (Trust the talent of everyone — high in the company to low — not just the words of those at your level or above.)

I didn’t know that this book was centered on business when I began. I expected the topic of leadership in this book to be more general. Regardless, I believe that almost all of the ideas presented in the book are applicable to community-organizing settings, which I’m more interested in than corporate settings.

An easy enough read that I’d recommend to anyone hoping to pick up a few good pointers on leadership of any kind.

Fantastic book filled with great ideas from a servant leadership perspective. Here are some of my favorite quotes:

"Giants give others the gift of space, space in both the personal and the corporate sense, space to be what one can be." p. 75

" We must become, for all who are involved, a place of realized potential." p. 85

"In the end, it is important to remember that we cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are." p. 100

"Today's trust enables the future. We also enable the future by forgiving the mistakes we all make while growing up. we free each other to perform in the future through the medium of trust." p. 114-115

It had a lot of great insights into how to enable others around you to do their best work by doing your best work. Offered cool thoughts on how to engage in corporate life and merge the gap between beliefs outside of work and within work.

The author, former CEO and chairman of the board of directors at furniture maker Herman Miller, shares his viewpoint on leadership. It’s an idealistic account of what companies can be when leaders are open and understanding. One of his main ideas is that leaders owe a great deal to the companies they lead: they need to provide a statement of values, space for employees to grow, a vision for present and future, momentum (“a debt to the future”), and effectiveness, among other things.

De Pree defines effectiveness as “doing the right thing” as opposed to just doing the thing right. He also sets a high premium on Roving Leadership (the ability of others to lead temporarily when their unique talents call for it), and participative management (encouraging others to have a say, fostering a culture of respect for diversity of talents, the importance of covenants – an understanding that work has value and meaning – as opposed to impersonal contracts). In sum, he rejects “the dry rules of business school” and pushes liberation over control, ritual and storytelling, trust over hierarchy, people over structures, civility over rules, and wisdom over manuals. It’s an impressive philosophy, and I’m astonished to see it so closely adhere to that of my current workplace (I was asked to read this for work). Knowing what the alternative could be makes me even more gratified and amazed that such places do exist.

The book Leadership is an Art by Max Depree is a book that you can learn from. The book talks about the meaning of leadership in the authors own words. He talks about the experiences that he has had with this company that you get introduced to in the book. The author also introduces characters that have helped him in his journey. By the end of his journey, he knows the answer to his question?

I really liked the book and thought that the book had some good points. I like how the author gives really good evidence to back up what he is saying. I liked the flow of the book also it had like a rhythm to it. One thing that I disliked about the book was that the pieces of evidence that the author gave really bored me. Overall it was a great book and I would recommend this book to anyone that wants to find out what true leadership is.

A somewhat interesting 36-year-old book on business leadership by the now-deceased former CEO and son of the founder of office furniture company Herman Miller, Max De Pree (1924-2017). Incidentally Herman Miller was acquired by Knoll for $1.8 billion in 2021, so it would be interesting to see if the business and leadership pearls De Pree shares are still part of the current company's values and operations.

About 3/4 of this book are platitudes/generalizations, and about 1/4 is good leadership advice with some useful examples (i.e., how if an employee in a company feels like they can't call their own company's customer service line and be appropriately assisted, something is seriously wrong with how company culture, and probably indicates would-be customers aren't getting treated well either).

Same author as Leadership Jazz which I liked, but this wasn't as good. Focused more on corporate leadership than general theory, he talked too much about his experiences in his dad's company, felt like a promo piece in a way...

I read this book as part of a book study with the leadership team at my school. Although there were some good lessons it was not the life-changing experience I was told to expect. The book and its lessons may have aged well for corporate leadership but I didn't find much relevance to my leadership role in an educational institution.

didnt really learn much from this