Book Review | The enemies of excellence by Greg Salciccioli

Book Title: The enemies of excellence

Author: Greg Salciccioli 

Blindness is widespread today as disgraced leaders sit in the wreckage of their own actions, stunned at their own capacity for deviance. Leadership Excellence is a journey and in the journey there will be hurdles. Some of the failures are due to unforeseen conditions and few due to personal conditions.  The world is beautiful when you are successful and the world is more meaningful when there is a purpose attached to living. Everyone is susceptible to self-sabotage—especially in the presence of success. This book is on about being a morally strong a leader,  has to overcome seven core risks which one needs checked and worked on in order to excel.  By identifying and learning to recognize each risk, leaders can stop creating misery for themselves and the people who rely on them emotionally and financially. The Enemies of Excellence can affect anyone—from the corner office to the conference room, and from the classroom to the living room.

Managing personal life is a struggle for every leader. We all have flaws that blind us. If left unattended and unexamined, they will eventually destroy us. One of my own tragic flaws was anger, which affected everything in my life. The book narrates the seven core enemies classified into common and disastrous for excellence. The first three Egotism, Life Mismanagement, Bad Habits are commonly found in most of the leaders. Timely feedback, due-diligence and awareness on these can be controlled through willpower. Indulgence, Broken relationships, Isolation and Self-sabotage are the lethal for excellence. All these seven core risks occurs when being successful or enjoying success is at top of the mind resulting in mismanagement.  Therefore it is needed to be grounded and do a self-check to ensure that success is not captured in mind and body.

The first three Enemies of Excellence. As egotism is allowed to exist, it breeds arrogance, and arrogance in turn builds ignorance. People become ignorant of the other Enemies that are active in their life and leadership. The second Enemy ensures that the balance between work and life is ignored and allowed to break down. As work-life balance breaks down, bad habits accumulate. This third Enemy opens the door to the dark side of Indulgence.

Egotists make people feel expendable. Ego-driven leaders not only harm themselves and others—they destabilize and potentially destroy organizations. To avoid the enemy of an egocentric focus, we need to not only determine to avoid egotism but to understand the benefits of altruism. Altruism has great advantages over egotism.

Life Mismanagement: a situation due to egotism is disorganized or controlled badly. This may be in the personal life or corporate life, may be due to habits or addicts. Due to external environment or internal pressure. Enemy of Life Mismanagement can’t stand against a person who establishes their priorities and drives towards them each day. Life mismanagement is basically due to centrally decision making and controls. Decentralization and Delegation of controls is advantages over Life Mismanagement.

Bad Habits: Patterned behaviour regarded as detrimental to one’s physical or mental health, which is often linked to lack of self-control. Everyone has a bad habit. Some are more obvious than others. The primary reason that we are overrun by the Enemy of Bad Habits has to do with intentional versus reactionary living. The first step in choosing intentional leadership lies in a simple but powerful best practice.

Indulgence: Indulgence means yielding to your desires, resulting in excess that undermines your success. Indulgence dismantles the conscience piece by piece until the alarms of moderation or morality are silenced. With the alarm system disabled, all kinds of destructive behaviour can be explored.

Isolation: An ideal mind is a devils workshop, Isolation will lead to power for destruction. The enemy of Isolation will plan of attack is to divide and conquer. He wants us to leave the presence of others and go it alone, to be the maverick who ends up masterminding his own demise.

Self-Sabotage: Self-sabotage is any behaviour, thought, emotion or action that holds you back from getting what you consciously want. Moreover, it’s the conflict that exists between conscious desires and unconscious wants that manifest in self-sabotage patterns.  Self-sabotage patterns because we are unable to manage our emotions effectively.