The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive:
The Four Disciplines at the Heart of Making Any Organization World Class
Patrick Lencioni
“In this stunning follow-up to his best-selling book, The Five Temptations of a CEO, Patrick Lencioni offers up another leadership fable that’s every bit as compelling and illuminating as its predecessor. This time, Lencioni’s focus is on a leader’s crucial role in building a healthy organization–an often overlooked but essential element of business life that is the linchpin of sustained success. Readers are treated to a story of corporate intrigue as the frustrated head of one consulting firm faces a leadership challenge so great that it threatens to topple his company, his career, and everything he holds true about leadership itself. In the story’s telling, Lencioni helps his readers understand the disarming simplicity and power of creating organizational health, and reveals four key disciplines that they can follow to achieve it.”
This is a pretty good book but not as riveting as his others. Like Lencioni’s other books, the majority of the book is told as a fable. You get invested in the characters and it’s realistic and relatable. For this particular book we see two CEOs at competing firms. You can’t help but feel sorry for them both and want them both to succeed despite them being direct competitors.
The author also explains the 4 disciples (the theory) in a short, succinct chapter at the end. The fable makes you remember and relate to the theory and having the direct theory chapter is helpful if you want to refer to it later.
I personally didn’t gain heaps from this book, as I think I’m applying a lot of this already. It also touched on some points which are in his other books, so it was a little repetitive in that respect. I recommend this book for anyone who is a leader in some way – it’s not just for CEOs. 4 stars
This book is exactly as it says, a step by step guide on how to turn good ideas into not just great but killer ideas! The author breaks down the steps into each chapter and gives you lots of business examples to relate to the steps. It’s very well written and kept me wanting to read more! There are also in real life practical questions to ask yourself at the end of each chapter to help get you started on coming up with your ideas. I always love great take-aways from books such as this, as well as a dot point summary at the end of each chapter that you can refer back to without needing to re-read the whole thing.
The book I reviewed is the new version that includes references to COVID-19 and the thinking of some people around that (so this cover isn’t quite right).
I picked up this book as an audiobook to listen to in the car. I didn’t get to it for a while as I had some other books to listen to first. By the time I got up to it I didn’t remember the synopsis of what it was about and had no expectations. As soon as I started listening, I loved it straight away and couldn’t stop listening! The whole book is structured like a memoir of the story of the authors life. I don’t normally like memoirs but this book was amazing. The story was told really well and kept you listening for more.
For a book on how to make ideas stick, and be remembered, I don’t think I remember much at all. It probably didn’t help that I listened to it on and off in the car over a period of time. In saying that, there were only 1 or 2 times when I really just wanted to keep listening to it, so clearly it didn’t hook me in much either.
I listened to this book as an audio book. It seemed to take quite a while to get into it. For a book on building a story and getting you hooked into it, it really didn’t at all! It took a bit over an hour before it started picking up. Lucky for it, I was in the car on a long trip so I kept listening to it. The rest of the book was pretty good. There were a few slow points but overall it was really great.
I picked up this book from the opp shop. It clearly came out quite a while ago but it is a good solid book on being the best manager. Unfortunately I read it over a long period of time, putting it down and picking it up again so it’s hard to review. It’s one of those books that need this though. You need to read a small section and then go away and think about it. I even found myself thinking about it while reading and required pausing a lot. The only issue with this is I need to read it again before I even finished reading it as I don’t remember the start already!
I’m a little mixed on this review. There were some good parts and some bad. The book takes you through the 
I can’t believe it has such good reviews and ratings on 
I read this as an audiobook and it was absolutely amazing! It helped that the author read it as the way he told the stories was just brilliant. It’s jam packed full of founder/CEO/business owners stories of how they got where they are today – the good, the bad, the boring and the ugly parts. A lot of business books only tell the success stories. I love that this book didn’t just show the successes but was just the truth of how they got there.