help_outline Skip to main content
Add Me To Your Mailing List

News / Articles

Dare to Lead by Bren'e Brown

Published on 11/5/2019

Dare to Lead by Bren’e Brown

 

A Book Review by Ed Ladd

 

This is the best work on leadership that I have read in a long time. She grabbed me in her opening note when she stated “my growing resolve is to go full-on Tom Petty and not back down.”  I mean, who quotes a rock star when talking about leadership? Her writing is diamond sharp and crystal clear, which means it is easy to read but yet is rich in its content.  Reading “Dare To Lead,” reminded me of the first time that I read Jim Collins and kept nodding my head in assent, as I read deeper and deeper.  Like Collins, Brown’s work is based on extensive research, and also like Collins, it is delivered as a mandate, a statement of undeniable beliefs about leadership and the cognitive tools required to lead with courage and purpose.  Also, like Collins, Brown develops her own vocabulary – words like “rumble” and “armor” and “arena” – and these capture vividly the concepts she is describing.

 

The book is divided into four parts that expound upon vulnerability, values, trust, and “learning to rise.”  The first section, which covers almost three quarters of the book, is about what she describes as “rumbling with vulnerability.”  As she says, “You can’t get to courage without rumbling with vulnerability – embrace the suck.”  By rumble, she means to connect with people through honest and frank interchanges – to have a “real conversation.”  She defines leadership “as anyone who takes the responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes, and who has the courage to develop that potential.”  Brown believes, and explains beautifully, the correlation between the ability to lead “daringly” and the capacity for vulnerability. She sees the courage of leadership, as “I know I will eventually fail, and I am still all in.” Throughout this section she explores the need for connection, the power of empathy, the dangers of shame, and the need for curiosity.  Her breakdown of the differences between “Armored Leadership” and “Daring Leadership” is one of the most powerful self-reflective triggers I have experienced.  Brown believes that one must “operate from self-awareness, not self protection.” As she states emphatically, “Our job (as leaders) is to connect.”

 

Throughout this book, Brown uses a number of familiar and contemporary sources: Jim Collins, Joseph Campbell, Beyonce, Melinda Gates, Leonard Cohen, and Star Wars.  These references and stories create a work that is “plain talk” as opposed to academic erudition and enables the read to be one that allows the ideas to surface without any distractions.

 

Her second section on “Living Into Your Values” was one of my favorite parts. She insists that one must narrow their key values to as few as two. She defends this with a quote from Jim Collins: “If you have more than three priorities, you have no priorities.”  Values, for Brown, should be observable and practiced.  She states,  “Daring leaders work from the assumption that people are doing their best.” And I love her definition of integrity: Choose courage over comfort; choose what’s right over what is fun, easy, or fast; and practice your values, not just profess them.”

 

Her third and fourth sections of “Trust” and “Daring To Rise” are equally challenging and thoughtful.  She sees trusts is the “one thing that can change everything” and “with trust, all things are possible.”  “Daring To Rise” is about the concept to be resilience; to be able to get back up when one fails; to not “put on the armor of self protection” and continue to operate from vulnerability and daring.  One of her closing remarks states, “Choosing to live and love with our whole hearts is an act of defiance.”

 

In “Dare To Lead,” Brown has created a seminal work on leadership that all who engages with it and its powerful ideas will benefit.  For me, I wish that I had read this and been trained in some of these skills, for I know, that I would have been a better leader from having done so.