Courage

Gus Lee is the best-selling author of China Boy and a nationally recognized expert on leadership and ethics. He is also adjunct staff at the Center for Creative Leadership and the U.S. Department of Justice. Lee lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Diane Elliott-Lee is a distinguished and award-winning clinical nurse specialist. She has helped edit Gus's five previous books and provided the guidance, inspiration, and structure for this book.

In this guide to doing the right thing, Lee presents a self-help approach to solving hard-edged problems. The key to effective leadership, he argues, is "principled conduct under pressure"—in short, courage. While courage is hardly the one-size-fits-all magic bullet that Lee envisions, much of his advice is valuable, particularly that dealing with communication, the thorniest management issue of all. The book is built around extended anecdotes about executives facing tough personnel decisions and having to confront their habits of "avoidant communication," and Lee's reconstructed dialogue is engaging, realistic and instructive. He also offers periodic references to his own, genuinely inspiring transition from myopic, alienated wimp to successful executive, lawyer, executive coach, consultant and bestselling novelist (China Boy, etc.). Granted, this business book has many of the problems typical of the genre: the constant invoking of the book's title, whether or not relevant to the point being made; the regular introduction of acronymed concepts and clumsy coinages; the inspirational speeches and the occasional royal we phrasing ("We now see the difference between high, medium and low core values"). But any book that offers a road map to handling unpleasant workplace conversations is welcome—even if the choices in your everyday life don't require as much courage as in Lee's scenarios. (Feb.) (Publishers Weekly, December 12, 2005)

• Introduction 1Part One: Backbone at the Point of Decision 91. Chris’s Story 112. Seeking Courageous Core Values 193. Going Deeper (and Higher) into Values and Ethics 314. Chris Boldly Moves Forward 435. Coda: Applying Courageous Values at Whirlpool 57Part Two: Courage in Action 636. Courageous Communication 657. The Courageous Communication Model 758. Courageous Feedback 899. Courage by Example 10510. Courageous Leadership 11311. Three Acts of Courageous Leadership 12512. Courageous Problem Solving: The Black Box 14513. Using Courageous Communication from the Bottom Up 161Part Three: Growing Your Courage 17314. Everyday Habits That Build Courage 17515. Your Character Quotient 18516. The Courage to Change 199Notes 205Acknowledgments 211The Authors 213Index 215