James M. Strock - Serve to Lead®--Your Transformational 21st Century Leadership System

Your Transformational
21st Century Leadership System

Serve to Lead Press

Serve to Lead

Copyright James M. Strock, 2010
All rights reserved.

Serve to Lead Press, Scottsdale, Arizona USA
www.servetoleadpress.com

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the copyright owner. For permissions please write to .

Serve to Lead , Who Are You Serving? , and Every Days a Decision are registered trademarks of James Strock & Co.

Kindle edition. LCCN: 2009906269

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any Web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

Author Photo: Irving Tromberg
Front Cover Photo: istockphoto.com
Index: Doran Hunter, Ocotillo Editorial Services

Printed in the United States of America
2010

Leadership as service is so obvious once one has pondered the idea and its applicationand, alas, so rare in current practice. This is a superb book.

TOM PETERS
Author of The Little BIG Things and In Search of Excellence

Serve to Lead.distills timeless leadership principles into readily accessible, actionable practices that you can put to work today.

WARREN BENNIS
Distinguished Professor of Business, University of Southern California and author of On Becoming a Leader

Serve to Lead is the essential guidebook to 21st century leadership. On a personal level, this book has changed my life; I urge men and women who aspire to make a difference in the world to let it change theirs as well.

MARTI BARLETTA
Author of Marketing to Women and Prime Time Women

Serve to Lead is a book of far-ranging insight, as much about life as it is about business. It is concise, thoughtful andperhaps most importantlyuseful.

FRANK BLAKE
CEO, The Home Depot, Inc.

Serve to Lead is a really great book.

LEO HINDERY, JR.
Managing Director, InterMedia Partners

Serve to Lead will be one of the greatest leadership books of this decade.

DANIEL MURPHY
Publisher and writer, Books2Wealth.com

Who are you serving? is the question at the heart of James Strocks Serve to Lead, and it is the question that will change your entire vision of how you lead. If you are committed to being a truly effective leader in the twenty-first century, read this booktoday.

HUGH HEWITT
Broadcast Journalist, law professor and New York Times bestselling author of Blog

If you read only one book on leadership read Serve to Lead!

DOUG DUCEY
Chairman, iMemories Former CEO & chairman, Cold Stone Creamery

Serve to Lead isone of the best books youll read on how to think about service and how to get your leadership to be one of service.

MICHAEL MCKINNEY
Leading Blog, LeadershipNOW.com

Serve to Lead has inspired me to actually change my leadership behavior: its powerful stuff and gets results! It should be required reading for all aspiring CEOs.

TAARIQ LEWIS
Leadership for CEOs, taariqlewis.com

Serve to Lead succinctly captures the essence of the quintessential twenty-first-century leadership style.[A]dherence to the key concepts in this book can significantly improve ones leadership and ultimate success.

JOE BEYERS
Chairman & CEO, Ambature Former Vice President, Hewlett-Packard

Serve to Lead is a gift, teaching that leadership and love are synonymous.

MICHAEL J. MALOUF
Senior Vice President, Employee Benefit Sales, MetLife

Serve to Lead is one of the few business books Ive read that offers a truly democratic vision of leadershipa vision that can help leaders of every kind better serve their colleagues, their clients, and their community. Pick up a copy now and use Strocks insights to turn the raw material of your life into a masterpiece of service.

DANIEL H. PINK
Author of A Whole New Mind and Drive

There have been many books about servant leadership over the years, but this is one of my favorites. You need this one in your library.

DAVE ANDERSON
Author of Business by The Book

Leadership is about service.and [Serve to Lead] shows us how. Organizations today need leaders at all levels throughout the enterprise, not just at the top. This book is a must-read for everyone who aspires to lead through service.

BILL NOVELLI
Former President & CEO of AARP

This inspirational book offers a heartfelt, revolutionary approach for twenty-first-century leadership. With its vision for our transition from a transaction-based to a relationship-based world, Serve to Lead is a blueprint for leadership success.

ROBIN GERBER
Author of Leadership the Eleanor Roosevelt Way: Timeless Strategies from the First Lady of Courage

Serve to Lead is much more than a stake through the heartif it existsof fossilized hierarchies everywhere. Putting service before self, Strock has written an invaluable guidebook to the purposeful life. Boy, do we need it now!

RICHARD NORTON SMITH
Presidential Historian and author of Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation

Theodore Roosevelt on Leadership:
Executive Lessons from the Bully Pulpit

Reagan on Leadership:
Executive Lessons from the Great Communicator

With Admiration and Appreciation

To the Honorable Alan K. Simpson

and

To the Memory of Richard E. Neustadt

The Four Questions

Who Are You Serving?

How Can You Best Serve?

Are You Making Your Unique Contribution?

Are You Getting Better Every Day?

It may seem obvious now, but it took us several decades of observation, analysis and intellectual debate to come to the conclusion that there is no leader without followers, and that leadership only exists, after all, in the eye of the beholder, that is, the follower.

Initial accounts of leadership asked whether leaders are endowed with special attributes, likely innate, that make them particularly magnetic and charismatic. We owe this line of thinking to nineteenth-century historians and philosophers such as Thomas Carlyle, who argued that the history of the world is but the biography of great men. These great man theories of leadership finally fell out of grace as it became clear that the very notion of greatness can vary significantly depending on circumstances.

Research conducted after World War II began to distinguish different leadership styles, recognizing that not all leaders are the same and that successful leaders may achieve extraordinary results in radically different ways. These theories later led to more sophisticated contingency models that prescribed specific leadership approaches depending on the circumstances: how well structured is the task at hand, how mature is the team one is leading, how favorable are the relations between leader and followers, how much power can the leader exercise, etc. Like the great man theories, these frameworks kept the focus on the leader, not the follower.

Ironically, it took a truly great man to turn the great man theory on its head. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., argued that everyone can be great, because everyone can serve. And it is this simple but profound idea that underlies James Strocks powerful Serve to Lead concept. Greatness is not an innate ability of a leader, but a consideration bestowed on the leader by those who he or she serves.

Dr. King taught us that You dont have to have a college degree to serve. You dont have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love. Strock extends this basic idea to leadership in the twenty-first century.