Speed Leadership: A New Way to Lead for Rapidly Changing Times (Second Edition) offers a genuine break from how leadership is normally understood. Instead of treating leadership as personality, charisma, or art, the book reframes it as a set of processes: measurable, improvable, and scientific. Its central idea is captured in a simple equation, Leadership = di/dt: the leader's job is to get information to flow, and the key unit of measure is time, not money. The result is a practical, human-centered method for leading in fast-moving times while reducing the stress of poor leadership that silently harms employees' health and well-being.
This book helps readers by:
Redefining Leadership as Information Flow. Introduces Speed Leadership and its core equation, establishing that a leader's primary role is to keep information moving – quickly, undistorted, and free of information fidelity-destroying organizational politics.
Making Leadership a Visible Process. Recasts the everyday things leaders do as identifiable "leadership processes," giving readers something concrete to examine and improve rather than vague personal traits or behaviors.
Exposing the Cost of Process Errors. Details the consequences of leadership process errors – confusion, rework, delays, stressed employees, and threatened long-term survival – so readers grasp what is really at stake.
Rightsizing the Leader's Role. Shows how leaders become major bottlenecks and how to "rightsize" their own approval and inspection processes, so they enable workers to accomplish their tasks with much less delay and rework.
Setting Standards for Leadership. Brings standardized work to leadership itself, defining clear standards for leadership processes that make consistent, high-quality leading possible.
Improving Leadership Continuously. Provides specific, actionable methods for improving leadership processes over time and treating the leader's own work as subject to kaizen.
Fixing Flawed Competency Models. Critiques conventional leadership competency models and shows how a process view corrects their many weaknesses.
Turning Insight into Daily Practice. Closes by urging leaders to commit to daily practice, like learning a musical instrument, to produce genuinely "employee-pleasing" leadership.
Practical, specific, and grounded in more than fifteen years of research, teaching, and real leadership experience, this offers clear pathways to improvement. For leaders and organizations weary of behavior personality-based training that never changes anything – and for anyone who recognizes that poor leadership is a health hazard – Speed Leadership is a precise, humane, and genuinely better way to lead.
