The Servant : A Simple Story About the True Essence of Leadership

Customer Reviews

This is a fictional story of a manager that goes on a weeklong leadership retreat. He has been successful but is finding his life not what it should be. His marriage is suffering, his relationships with his children are suffering, his relationships with his employees is strained. So he allows himself to go on a retreat in which he doesn't see himself learning a great deal on.

But that is where he is wrong. The majority of the book is focused on what he did learn. Through a fictional teacher and fictional leadership seminar, James Hunter takes us all on a journey of self discovery. He breaks down leadership to its most basic characteristics, much to the reader's surprise.

It is a well written book that I immediately bought several more copies of to give as gifts to some of my closest friends.

The plot revolves around a glass plant manager who is having difficulty in his marriage as well as his career. He agrees to spend a week at a monastery to appease his psychologist wife, and there he enrolls in a week-long leadership course taught by a wealthy businessman turned monk named Simeon. Also in his class are five other people: a nurse, a drill sergeant, a basketball coach, a preacher, and a principal, who serve the purpose of providing realistic perspectives from a variety of backgrounds. The lessons they learn together and the interactions they have in the class comprise the majority of the leadership teaching of the book.

As evidenced by the title, the premise of leadership professed here is servant leadership, based most significantly on the model of Jesus Christ. That having been said, however, the author makes many references to the findings and theories of psychology, and the he takes care to justify his position by having Simeon answer the questions posed by skeptical members of the class when the Christian element of things is brought into the conversation. All of this is done very artfully within the fabric of the story; so well, in fact, that it is almost as if the story stands by itself, and the tenets about leadership are gleaned almost in passing.

Overall, this book accomplishes what other books like "The One Minute Manager" and "Who Moved My Cheese?" have done to a lesser extent: it takes important facets of a given topic (leadership) and presents them in an entertaining and easy to understand story, rather than the traditional didactic approach. I have read numerous books on leadership, and this is one of the best I have encountered-highly recommended.

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