Leadership Chronicles of a Corporate Sage: Five Keys to Becoming a More Effective Leader

Bethanis, a San Francisco-based executive coach, offers a show-don’t-tell glimpse into her work of shaping raw, by-the-book executives into kinder-and-gentler powerhouses. Rather than preaching, Bethanis uses a six-month series of sessions with "Max," a top executive whose leadership skills haven’t developed as quickly as his career, to illustrate the path to "corporate sagedom," a state that incorporates top business tactics, people skills, on-the-job know-how and some intangibles that, yes, a professional coach can teach. The premise of learning as a business tool isn’t new in the corporate world, but Bethanis’s approach in the book is, and it works refreshingly well, even for a reader initially skeptical of Max, of the "play-acting" technique at work here and of the coaching process as a whole. There is value in the lessons learned through the interplay between the author/coach and her executive/student; from "go slow to go fast" to "coach in-the-moment to build a legacy," the key points hit home faster and clearer simply because of the way the book is set up as a session-by-session dialogue, rather than as straight lesson from yet another expert. There is certainly much here to be learned by any businessperson open to taking it all in.

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