What Really Counts: Leadership for Life takes a fresh look at what the world appears to see and accept as qualities necessary to reach the top. More importantly, the author questions this approach. To become a leader requires many different characteristics but that does not mean that all leaders are good people or become the ones that others would like to serve under.
Teachers, schools, students, uniformed services, up and coming business managers, adventurers on expeditions, professionals wishing to excel and everyone (both men and women) with an open and inquiring mind can benefit from the author’s extensive experience in laying out the criteria for lasting success and effective, goal-orientated and value-based techniques for achieving optimum results – both at work and in personal lives.
This book is eminently practical. It is not theoretical. It is based on insightful and objective personal experience, lessons learned and decades of study on the subject. It challenges all of us to take another look at what it takes to succeed meaningfully while enjoying lasting happiness and peace of mind. Hundreds of examples of world, national and local leaders are represented historically and currently via their respective fields as nation builders, military commanders, political leaders, business tycoons, adventurers and plain ordinary folk who have made a difference. This easily readable and eminently practical account examines many different aspects of the subject including human psychology, personality types, human nature, ambition and legacies to be left behind and how we judge success; but digs deeper to reveal the negative repercussions and ramifications of wrong uses of leadership – even though history demonstrates that gullible masses and weak individuals have tended to follow mindlessly or out of fear. Conversely the book highlights the rewards of good leadership whether inherited or learned along the way and to what degree these positive qualities are based on art or science.
Kelvin Kent, originally from the UK but having lived in the United States for 35 years, builds his case for strong, ethical and effective leadership by emphasizing all the traits, characteristics and qualities that are necessary for a worthy and respected leader to understand and develop. The goal; becomes one of producing better, lasting results, without loss of face, usurping of power or having to resort to bad practices. He then refines this list into what he calls the Fourteen Pillars that are indispensible in order to achieve the maximum and most beneficial outcome as win-win whereby everyone participates.
With personal business experiences and anecdotes, lessons learned as a military commander, community leader and adventurer in the field and how leaders of expeditions cope when things go wrong, Kelvin Kent illuminates the way forward to attaining what is necessary and right. In short: How leadership is acquired and how it works. Kent’s personal life, with its many ups and downs, is an amazing journey in itself and provides, in a frank, honest fashion, what we need to know to excel in our respective fields.
Not least of what is covered is the subject of ego and its damaging effects, if not recognized and corrected. Women are also highlighted for their own particular brands of leadership, often regarded as more relationship-orientated and gentler in approach while still showing and gaining respect, to reach the highest positions.