The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive by Patrick Lencioni

Last week I finished another of Patrick Lencioni’s book — The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive: A Leadership Fable. In this early book (written even before Five Dysfunctions of a Team) the author emphasizes on why organizational health is the ultimate differentiator between a successful and failed business as well as how to achieve that.

Organizational health can be measured by knowing whether employees are confused about their goals and priorities, how much politics is around, is the employee morale low, what is is the employee turnover rate, how productive the teams are. The author suggests that healthy organizations can smarter, but smart organizations do not get healthy without proper leadership from the head of the organization. It also feels soft; easily dismissed by hard-nosed leaders; requires discipline and courage. So the author proposed four disciplines via this business fable.

Below is a summary of these four disciplines to easily remember. My favorite is over-communication — repetition of the key messages, simplicity of the messages and channeling through multiple mediums (for example — email, slack or other messaging tools, during team meetings, over written documents etc).

Originally published at http://ashikuzzaman.wordpress.com on July 7, 2021.