Matt McAvoy Book Review

This is, quite simply, a hugely professional business strategy publication, by a highly proficient author.  Servant leadership, in a nutshell, is the art of good people management skills, which are essential in modern business and, as anyone with any degree of business sense or even just common sense will tell you, creates an infinitely more productive and engaged workforce.  Valuing employees and giving them input, and a psychological or even actual stake in the company’s future, is undoubtedly more beneficial for all parties concerned.  That’s what this book is about – with detail.  Whilst equality people management is a common message, it is unlikely you will read such a comprehensive, properly sourced and extremely articulate case for servant leadership style elsewhere.  This book is simply a must for those working in management at any level, as it combines business reporting, motivational quotes from inspiring historical moments and, perhaps most vitally, the importance of positive psychology in industry leadership.  Likewise, if you are an ambitious employee, looking for ways to achieve greater status or purpose in your current position, this book also shows how servant leaders can be motivated into existence by juniors, if they are persuasive enough. 

What sets this book apart is its quality, and the professionalism of its author Omar L. Harris – he is superb; if you are looing for ways to inspire an under-motivated workforce, he can teach you a lot, to be sure.  He doesn’t just write a book on the subject, but present an entire ideology of working practice, as thoroughly and clearly as he can.  Furthermore, Omar is experienced enough to provide a control sample, via the more traditional, mercenary approach to business management – humbly and with some embarrassment, it has to be said, as he fully admits that whilst the traditional model boasts financial success, revisiting companies where he applied it years earlier showed evidence of a bitter legacy.

At around midway, Omar begins to apply his model to apparently all of the world’s social injustices and, whilst there is relevance here, these moments do seem to veer the book toward another overall, much bigger agenda of liberal discoursing.  But, it quickly gets on track, and these parts are acceptable inevitabilities of an informative non-fictional book of this day and age; furthermore, in the main, this book is right on the nail in its message.  Perhaps by the end, I felt one important element was missing, and that was more concrete evidence – proven case studies and evidence from companies which have put servant leadership into practice policy; such a section as this was perhaps conspicuous by its absence, and may have contributed in small part to the underlying feeling of global idealism.

There is some fantastic referencing in the book, high quality, credible and comprehensively crossed in an appendix of endnotes.  There is no question that Omar has put huge work into this publication, both in its writing and the knowledge that involved.  He has produced an essential book for every management professional’s business bookshelf.