The protagonists of most business books have names like Welch, Gerstner, or Drucker. In Ready to Lead, our hero is Mark Gibson—and he doesn't exist.
Author Alan Price combines a fictional character with real-life business situations to get at the issue of what is needed for a talented manager to grow into a leader. The book begins with Gibson's performance review on his third anniversary, at which his boss delivers a complimentary evaluation and ends with a question: "Are you ready to lead?" There begin his first steps toward thinking about and eventually becoming an effective leader.
The issues dealt with here are familiar including developing the right mindset for advancing from management to leadership, incorporating the customer's perspective, focusing on the mission, dealing with conflict, and mentoring. But viewing these challenges through a fictional lens allows Price to offer these lessons in an entertaining and relatively brief (148 pages) parable.
Price is president of INSPIRITAS, and former director of the Global Leadership Initiative at Harvard Business School.