Steven Snyder: Leadership and the Art of Struggle - Blog Business Success Radio

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Leadership consultant, founder of Snyder Leadership Group, and author of the breakthrough and real world based book Leadership and the Art of Struggle: How Great Leaders Grow through Challenge and Adversity, Steven Snyder describes how leaders must embrace adversity and challenges to achieve their full potential as leaders. Steven Snyder points out that social mores that cause struggles to be seen as weakness cause great harm to leaders and to the organizations they lead. Steven Snyder shares an alternative approach to leadership through what he calls the struggle lens, where challenges are repositioned as positive learning opportunities. Steven offers the concept of building what he calls adaptive energy through resilience and self awareness. Steven presents the practices and exercises that will guide a leader inward toward greater self awareness and to eliminate personal blind spots. Steven Snyder teaches leaders to welcome struggle as an opportunity for learning and to develop fully as effective leaders.

Steven Snyder is my internet radio show guest on Blog Business Success; hosted live on BlogTalkRadio.

The show airs live on Tuesday, March 5, at 8:00 pm Eastern Time; 5:00 pm Pacific Time.

Leadership consultant, founder of Snyder Leadership Group, and author of the breakthrough and real world based book Leadership and the Art of Struggle: How Great Leaders Grow through Challenge and Adversity, Steven Snyder describes how leaders must embrace adversity and challenges to achieve their full potential as leaders. You will learn:

* Why social mores that consider leaders who struggle as ineffective are incorrect

* Why leaders must embrace challenge and adversity to learn and grow as leaders

* How to welcome struggle and utilize it to achieve your full leadership potential

* How other great leaders have embraced the struggle to benefit their organizations



Steven Snyder (photo left) is the founder and managing director of Snyder Leadership Group.

Steven Snyder joined Microsoft in 1983, when the company was in its infancy. His work there, praised by Bill Gates, secured the relationship with IBM during a crucial stage in Microsoft’s growth and helped shape the history of the personal computer industry. Promoted as Microsoft’s first business unit general manager, Snyder led the company’s Development Tool business, where his team won PC Magazine’s Technical Excellence Award on three occasions.

In 1996, Snyder co-founded Net Perceptions, where he commercialized “collaborative filtering” – a technology that enables the real-time personalized recommendations that have become central to the online shopping experience. This groundbreaking work won Snyder the first-ever World Technology Award for Commerce in 1999 for “contributing to the advance of emerging technologies for the benefit of business and society.”

Steven Snyder holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar, and a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Minnesota. Leadership and the Art of Struggle: How Great Leaders Grow through Challenge and Adversity is his first book.

My book review of Leadership and the Art of Struggle: How Great Leaders Grow through Challenge and Adversity by Steven Snyder.

Listen live on Tuesday at 8:00 pm Eastern, 5:00 pm Pacific time.



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Let's talk with leadership consultant, founder of Snyder Leadership Group, and author of the breakthrough and real world based book Leadership and the Art of Struggle: How Great Leaders Grow through Challenge and Adversity, Steven Snyder, as he describes how leaders must embrace adversity and challenges to achieve their full potential as leaders. Steven Snyder points out that social mores that cause struggles to be seen as weakness cause great harm to leaders and to the organizations they lead. Steven Snyder shares an alternative approach to leadership through what he calls the struggle lens, where challenges are repositioned as positive learning opportunities. Steven offers the concept of building what he calls adaptive energy through resilience and self awareness. Steven presents the practices and exercises that will guide a leader inward toward greater self awareness and to eliminate personal blind spots. Steven Snyder teaches leaders to welcome struggle as an opportunity for learning and to develop fully as effective leaders on Blog Business Success Radio.

Leadership and the Art of Struggle by Steven Snyder - Book review

Leadership and the Art of Struggle

How Great Leaders Grow through Challenge and Adversity

By: Steven Snyder

Published: March 11, 2013
Format: Paperback, 216 pages
ISBN-10: 1609946448
ISBN-13: 978-1609946449
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers








"Leadership is often a struggle. Yet societal taboos often prevent leaders from talking openly and honestly about their struggles for fear of being perceived as ineffective and inadequate", writes leadership consultant and founder of Snyder Leadership Group, Steven Snyder, in his breakthrough and real world based book Leadership and the Art of Struggle: How Great Leaders Grow through Challenge and Adversity. The author describes how societal expect an unrealistic perfection in leaders that causes a loss of confidence and derails their careers, and offers embracing of struggle and failure as afresh approach to achieving success.

Steven Snyder understands that the most insightful and self aware leaders realize that leadership is a struggle, and leverage adversity to learn and master their internal and external challenges. The author points out that the denial of struggle, and by maintaining the false premise that struggle is a sign of weakness, leaders fail both themselves and their organizations. By failing to recognize their own blind spots, leaders will repeat the same mistakes over and over, and never reach either their own or their organizational potential. To counter this unfavorable behavior, Steven Snyder proposes that a leader should look inward for deeper self awareness. Instead of denying struggle, the author offers a fresh alternative where struggle is understood and embraced to achieve one's full potential as a leader.



Steven Snyder (photo left) recognizes that the necessity of thinking differently about leadership, and of re-framing struggles as helpful and positive learning experiences. For the author, leadership must be examined through an entirely different lens if the leaders is to reach their fullest potential. In this case, the lens is one of struggle, where potential is reached through mastery of adversity.

Steven Snyder presents the struggle lens as a way of becoming grounded and harnessing the leader's own energy as what he calls adaptive energy. The author offers the following principles for embracing struggle, a;long with the positive steps and exercises to transform them into a way of living as a leader:

* Becoming grounded
* Exploring new pathways
* Deepening adaptive energy

For me,the power of the book is how Steven Snyder uncovers the underlying psychological aspects of leadership, and builds on that self awareness to grow as a leader. The author points out that the struggle for leaders is within themselves. To overcome the often ingrained social mores that depict struggle as weakness, Steven Snyder repositions the concept of struggle as a powerful force for learning and developing leadership skills.

In this very hands on book, Steven Snyder shares the first person accounts of successful leaders who embraced the art of struggle to fulfill their destinies as effective leaders. Each chapter contains challenging questions that require the leader to look inward to seek out their own answers and understanding. The author also includes practical exercises to guide and assist the leader in this self discovery and self awareness building process. Implementing the exercises will break the old habits and limiting modes of thinking that prevent positive leadership breakthroughs.

I highly recommend the empowering and illuminating book Leadership and the Art of Struggle: How Great Leaders Grow through Challenge and Adversity by Steven Snyder, to any leaders at all levels who are seeking a insightful and powerful process to change how they approach struggle and adversity, so as to embrace these realities, and achieve both personal and organizational potential. This book will change how you think about leadership, its challenges, and the rewards of understanding the true nature of struggle.

Beyond Good Intentions by Tori Hogan - Book review

Beyond Good Intentions

A Journey into the Realities of International Aid

By: Tori Hogan

Published: September 25, 2012
Format: Paperback, 304 pages
ISBN-10: 158005434X
ISBN-13: 978-1580054348
Publisher: Seal Press







"I felt a deep obligation to share the truth about aid with others and to uncover how the 'helping industry' could be reformed", writes researcher, filmmaker, aid critic, and founder and director of Beyond Good Intentions, Tori Hogan in her eye opening and provocative book Beyond Good Intentions: A Journey into the Realities of International Aid. The author describes how as a young intern in Kenya, for Save The Children, she discovered how the aid industry was failing to achieve its goals, and shares her personal journey to reform the abuses and failures of international aid.

Tori Hogan recognizes that not all aid is wasted, and indeed some aid agencies do the right thing and perform good works. The author also points out that while well intentioned, too much international aid to the developing world often results in more harm than good. During her eight year odyssey through Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda, Tori Hogan found enormous waste, inappropriate solutions pushed by outsiders, and counterproductive humanitarian activities that made the problems even worse.

The author shares her first hand experiences with the aid community, and reveals the failures of international aid and its often naive but well meaning volunteers and staff. At the same time, Tori Hogan presents a manifesto to others, to meet the challenges facing the people targeted for aid effectively, and to make a positive impact on their lives.



Tori Hogan (photo left) understands that the people, who are the intended recipients of the international assistance, are not always happy with the outcomes. Indeed, it was the story given to her by a young African boy that provided the impetus to the author's journey to reform the entire international aid effort. The harsh truth Tori Hogan learned in that fateful conversation transformed her life and her goals as a humanitarian.

Discovering that aid intentions are not always as they seem, and many being outright harmful to the recipients, Tori Hogan began a complete examination of the international aid process. To find out the real story, the author talked to the people who were the intended beneficiaries of the aid. The author was shocked to learn that aid was not only wasteful, but also given to the classic bureaucratic challenges of waste, entrenched elites, and mission creep. Tori Hogan traveled back to Africa, years after her initial epiphany, and visited Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda. In each country, the author's quest was the real truth about international aid.

For me, the power of the book is how Tori Hogan combines an overview of the challenges and problems resulting from international aid programs, with her own personal odyssey to uncover the real story from the recipients. The author shares the unvarnished story through her conversations with the people most affected by the aid efforts. Startling discussions are recounted of the failure of the aid to achieve even the most basic goals, and also how the recipients were actually harmed by the failures.

Along with the analysis of the shortcomings of international aid, Tori Hogan offers concrete recommendations for reforming the system to achieve positive results. The author offers the concept of involving local people in establishing their own goals, empowering the population, rather than maintaining the existing paternalistic programs. The author is both cautious, and optimistic, that tangible improvements can and will be made to really help the people in the developing world.

I highly recommend the groundbreaking and deeply personal book Beyond Good Intentions: A Journey into the Realities of International Aid by Tori Hogan, to anyone involved in international aid programs, public policy making, non-governmental organizations, corporate leadership, and interested citizens who want to make a real difference in the lives of people in the developing world. This book will change forever your perspective on international aid programs, transform your thinking into that of questioning the organizations, and empower change in how aid agencies conduct their operations.