Canter Bridge

Patrick Lencioni writes stories. Lots of them.

He calls them `fables’. `Leadership fables’, to be precise. It’s a growing genre in business publications, perhaps a sign that such writers and their editors and marketers have caught on to the power of narrative to make a point that often comes across as dry and abstract when it’s treated, well, dryly and abstractly.

Lencioni is not a great story writer. He’s just effective, which is probably satisfactory enough reward for this management consultant and, now, best-selling author (see The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, The Five Temptations of a CEO, and the hilariously betitled Death by Meeting).

His secret is to keep it simple. There’s not a lot of business theory here, but years of acute observation of leaders and the businesses they lead undergird the simple plot line of two executives of Bay Area firms, one who stumbles upon simplicity and another who just stumbles. Lencioni’s villains are a little too simple-minded for my tastes, his hero a bit too moral. But that’s only a critique if his intention is to write great literature. It’s not: he wants to help execs who become too harried for our own good and anybody else’s because we allow our task to complicate our work and, inevitably, our lives.

I won’t give away what the author’s four obsessions are. But they’re not rocket science. The author would be the first to tell you so.

Most of us need some simplicity. And a little bit of obsession. You’ll find them both here.