Surrender to Lead
The Counterintuitive Approach to Driving Extraordinary Results
Seeking to upend entire worldviews, the wisdom-filled leadership guide Surrender to Lead encourages flexibility and a “shift from force to flow” to unlock an organization’s full potential.
Jessica Kriegel and Joe Terry’s unorthodox leadership guide Surrender to Lead promotes adaptability over traditional top-down directives, contending that egos can undermine effective guidance. Touting its framework as counterintuitive, it reimagines management as work based in love, trust, and care, all built based on a “results equation” that combines purpose, strategy, and culture to generate growth and profits.
Drawing on a Stanford University study of 243 companies, interviews with 60 human resource officers, and a McKinsey study of 1,500 companies worldwide, this book seeks to upend entire worldviews, encouraging flexibility and a “shift from force to flow” to unlock an organization’s full potential. Divided into broad sections based on values of clarity, alignment, and accountability, it outlines its results equation before exploring topics like strategic drivers, forced recognition, and steps to accountability. It draws interesting insights from disparate fields, as when it explores the philosophies of recovery programs and holds up the tenacity of endurance athletes as a model for those in businesses. It even attempts to strip the very word “surrender” of its negative connotations to prompt seismic shifts.
The book includes sympathetic illustrations of the necessity of surrender throughout, as when it’s discussing control and lists ways situations can go awry:
The audience doesn’t laugh at my jokes. The project deadline is missed. We didn’t get our bookings target for the quarter. The kids are late for school. The dog ate the shoe. Whatever happens, we know it could have been better if it had been different. We double down. We get frustrated and resentful.
But the problem isn’t the world. It is our desire for control and the delusion that it can be obtained.
At its most direct, it is quite persuasive, helping audiences feel what it’s like to have one’s elderly parent waiting at the finish line or to struggle with a defective crank on the bicycling leg of a triathlon: Stop fighting reality, it suggests. Its confessional tone refreshes familiar language around turning points and epiphanies well, and it is convincing in asserting that people don’t challenge the status quo when they’re afraid.
Some of its examples are strained, though, as with its (albeit entertaining) comparisons of soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi’s different approaches on the field. Furthermore, it is prone to overusing its own terminology at the expense of clarity and progression. Even inventive and memorable acronyms like Surrender SHIFT feel superfluous to its overall delivery. In addition, beyond the book’s moving personal stories, some of its recommendations seem too easy and some of its declarations too stark, as with its claim that fear is a driving factor in every dysfunctional business. It makes sweeping arguments such as that the ego unpins fear, rigidity, and mistrust, appearing to oversimplify complex subjects. Still, its leadership propositions are appealing, identifying common shortcomings and undermining “the delusion of control” with conviction.
An unconventional leadership guide, Surrender to Lead contends that control has limits and that letting go drives positive results.
Reviewed by
Joseph S. Pete
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
