True North

Discover Your Authentic Leadership

By: Bill George, Peter Sims

Narrated by: Mark Adams

Length: 7 hrs and 53 mins

Publisher's summary

True North shows how anyone who follows his or her internal compass can become an authentic leader. This leadership tour de force is based on research and first-person interviews with 125 of today's top leaders - with some surprising results.

In this important audiobook, acclaimed former Medtronic CEO Bill George and coauthor Peter Sims share the wisdom of these outstanding leaders and describe how you can develop as an authentic leader. True North presents a concrete and comprehensive program for leadership success and shows how to create your own Personal Leadership Development Plan centered on five key areas:

Knowing your authentic self

Defining your values and leadership principles

Understanding your motivations

Building your support team

Staying grounded by integrating all aspects of your life

True North offers an opportunity for anyone to transform their leadership path and become the authentic leader they were born to be.

©2007 Bill George (P)2007 Gildan Media Corp

Critic reviews

"Bill George reminds us that compassion and understanding are as important qualities for business leaders as dedication and resolve." (President Jimmy Carter)

Interesting, but not what I was hoping for

I was expecting to be guided through the process of finding my authentic leadership style. This book just gives examples rather than providing a process that anybody could walk through.

Great business leadership book!

This book is ideal for the leader/entrepreneur that wants to be there best in the midst of a crisis or when their balance sheet is strong. It helps to keep business and personal agendas in perspective to maximize them all. I highly recommend this book!

A must if you're aspiring to become a true leader

Amazing stories and real life examples that we can all identify with, simply loved it

No index or table of contents

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

yes, It has a lot of good insights and the narrative relates well with examples and real life story line, references etc.

What other book might you compare True North to and why?

unable to answer

Which scene was your favorite?

Dont know yet

Was True North worth the listening time?

I am not sure yet but I will say this....

It is very difficult because I can not navigate by index or table of contents.
It is a can of worms mess.It is not formatted with the same order as the printed version.

The Audible version has 7 sloppy audible chapters, the book has 11 chapters .
It is very frustrating. It is impossible to navigate by topic or index subjects.

The actual segments of the written chapters begin in the in the middle of the chapter segments in the recordings.

There is no way, without doing a lot of speculative mathematics, to find what you are looking for in this book.

There should be a pdf of running time and chapters in the "my library" file with this book on the Audible web site.

Any additional comments?

I bought this book in search of material on "the authentic self."

I do not have time to listen to all the inertia and material they use to fill books these days.

Research is very unforgiving of wasted time and irrelevant tangents.

Chapter 4 in the written book begins in chapter 3 of the Audio book at 50:09 minutes into the segment...

Ch. 5 begins in chapter 4 at 14:49..

It is hard to believe that a book "well written" on "authentic leadership" was narrated with such chaotic format.

To my way of thinking, any true leader gets it about order and chaos and would not have stood for such and irresponsibly inaccurate format.

This is a total blunder.

The recordings should be re-formatted to match the actual copy. It is not fair to listeners to be cheated out of a normal convention which has been accepted for centuries.

forces you to reflect on what's important in life

Puts decision making in context of what is important to you over the long term. Not too much hyperbole and over promises about being transformed and doing so much better than before you read the book. it's more about how to be true to yourself while working in different environments and teams and how to ensure that "success" is on your terms

Authentic Leadership = Being Authentic

I was pretty excited to read this book, but then found it incredibly painful to listen to. The title of this post is really what I spent $20+ (and more importnatly, 8 hours) to learn. The author did indeed prove that he is logical (the title is not the only mantra he repeats throughout the book, others include: "being a consensus leader means that you build concensus", "living a full life means both in professional and personal life", and the like). Unfortunately what the author failed at is to provide one piece of insight thoughout the book. If you can skip this book and save yourself time and money, at least my listen will not go in vain. Good luck!

Nice idea, poor execution

This book is founded on the concept of finding out what is important to you, your "True North". Nice leadership concept, but the examples used in the book were limited to CEOs. Not every "leader" is a CEO, in fact most are not. I was very disappointed in this book overall.

Horrible narrator

I would like to read this book. Having a difficult time just listening. This narrator is horrible.

Maybe I'm missing something...

This book was recommended to me (a small business owner) VERY HIGHLY by someone who was once a very successful small business owner and now has a high level job in the corporate world. So maybe my expectations were too high. This book is really aimed at people in the corporate world, and a lot of the examples of people finding their "true north" actually happened after they were already extremely successful. I felt like the examples were often too clean cut, and the lessons seemed pretty basic. Towards the end I did feel like some of the things he was saying were useful, but up until that point the main messages are: 1) be yourself, 2) be a good person, and 3) when your boss asks you to do something immoral, follow your "true north" and you'll end up fine. Oh, and not only will this help you in business, but also in your marriage and friendships. Surprise.

So maybe I'm missing something? George is extremely successful, and the people interviewed for the book are also interesting. Maybe one day I'll hit a moment in my career where I have a decision to make and suddenly everything I listened to in this book will become more profound. But until then, most of the things he said are things we already know anyway. I guess it never hurts to get a reminder.