The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive by Patrick Lencioni

The Four Obsessions is a short book that begins with a somewhat confusing “fable”. A new employee has been hired in an organization based on his qualifications. However, he didn’t receive final interviews with the CEO who is careful to choose employees with specific values. We see the how the employee’s actions and reactions are detrimental to the organization as a whole in a series of descriptions of leadership meetings. His reactions indicate that he can’t understand the choices (based on the CEO’s “disciplines”) that are being made, because his values weren’t aligned with the company’s leadership team. When he leaves the company, he tries to explain the disciplines to a potential employer, who also doesn’t understand them. But they are the “four obsessions” that could help us become better leaders.

The fable does illustrate the “obsessions”, but since we don’t know what they are until late in the story, the fable doesn’t feel like it has a point. Luckily, this little book is significantly redeemed by the final section of the book: Putting the Disciplines into Action.

In the final section, each of the four Disciplines is broken down into parts and we’re given multiple ways to apply the ideas. We come to understand what the fable was presenting and the examples the fable gives make a lot more sense.

The one area that I was impressed with was assurance that “cohesive teams fight.” This realization is the recognition that people with differing perspectives and experience are not always going to agree in the beginning. But in cohesive teams, the disagreements are “about issues, not personalities. Most importantly [the team has] an amazing capacity to move on to the next issue, with no residual feelings” (pg 145). This happens when the people have been hired based on their personality match and values match. Those matches create a cohesive leadership team.

I recommend this book for its focus on how to build an effective leadership team. But I suggest starting with the final section and then reading the fable.

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