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There Is No Box
Leading isn’t just something you do; leadership is a lifestyle.
In today’s global economy, effective leadership requires engaging in diverse interactions, meaning there is no one, predefined way to lead. Instead, leaders today must be culturally agile, and they must live that awareness and adaptability each and every day.
There Is No Box is a practical guide for leaders who recognize how critical it is to draw outside the lines of typical guidance in order to rethink leadership development and gain competencies that make them more inclusive, culturally aware, and empowered to facilitate collaboration.
Authors Marisa Cleveland and Simon Cleveland draw on their combined forty years of experience in corporate, government, and higher education leadership to answer a question they’ve been getting for over two decades: how do lauded leaders live? Through anecdotes and interviews paired with actionable takeaways, the book investigates where leaders start, how they become boxed in upon entering the workforce, and finally how they can break through those boundaries to become a culturally agile leader and a meaningful contributor to our global society.
There Is No Box provides established and emerging leaders across all fields with the tools to make leadership their lifestyle.
In today’s global economy, effective leadership requires engaging in diverse interactions, meaning there is no one, predefined way to lead. Instead, leaders today must be culturally agile, and they must live that awareness and adaptability each and every day.
There Is No Box is a practical guide for leaders who recognize how critical it is to draw outside the lines of typical guidance in order to rethink leadership development and gain competencies that make them more inclusive, culturally aware, and empowered to facilitate collaboration.
Authors Marisa Cleveland and Simon Cleveland draw on their combined forty years of experience in corporate, government, and higher education leadership to answer a question they’ve been getting for over two decades: how do lauded leaders live? Through anecdotes and interviews paired with actionable takeaways, the book investigates where leaders start, how they become boxed in upon entering the workforce, and finally how they can break through those boundaries to become a culturally agile leader and a meaningful contributor to our global society.
There Is No Box provides established and emerging leaders across all fields with the tools to make leadership their lifestyle.
288 pages, Hardcover
Published November 8, 2022
6 people are currently reading
22 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 6, 2024
I was assigned this book for a course, otherwise I wouldn't have read the whole book. There seemed to be a lot of fluff, and this book could easily have been 50 to 100 pages shorter. The concepts were fairly simple, and it has little exercises at the end of every chapter. It felt very much like a self-help books targeted at wealthy people desiring more fulfillment from life. I did not like this book, and I'll try to explain why.
This entire book felt like a motivational speaker. Some element of that isn't so bad, but there was far too much of it. I could imagine much of it coming out of someone like Tony Robinson. Reading this book felt like like listening to a median TED Talk for multiple hours. There is lots of research on leadership, including leader-member exchange theory, trait-focused approached, behavior-focused approaches, and contingency theories. But this book didn't even touch on those well-researched concepts, and instead repeatedly emphasized that being relatable is the important thing. If you want to really learn about leadership, I think you would be better off reading the book Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time, or reading a few academic papers on leadership:
• Haslam, S. A., Alvesson, M., & Reicher, S. D. (2024). Zombie leadership: Dead ideas that still walk among us. The Leadership Quarterly, 101770.
• Hogan, R., & Kaiser, R. B. (2005). What we know about leadership. Review of general psychology, 9(2), 169-180.
Another thing that I didn't like was how the book appeared to be written for people that are wealthy and well-resourced. Phrases like "from that moment, I realized that I didn’t have to stay in a job that didn’t add value to my day," made it clear to me that the author is in a different work situation than the majority of people in the world, most of whom cannot leave a job without causing vast financial stress. Phrases like "there is nothing holding you back but you" seemed to ignore reality: if you are wealthy and well-networked and have an impressive pedigree then such a phrase might be more true, but think of someone undergoing cancer treatments, or someone dealing with discrimination and prejudice, or simply someone without many marketable skills or financial assets. Such phrases seem so bland and vague as to be useless. The author also described Atlas Shrugged in laudatory and uncritical terms.
There were also statements in the book that are active areas of research without any conclusive results, yet the author made claims as if they were simple truths. One example was "racial and ethnic diversity promotes active thinking skills and intellectual engagement." That can be true in some circumstances, but it is very context dependent and is moderated by other factors. If you don't want to take my word for it, I will appeal to authority: here is a quote from a Nobel prize winning economist (Esther Duflo) from the Handbook of economic field experiments: "homogenous groups are more productive (since communication within them is faster and easier). More homogeneous groups will create a trusting environment where people can work better together." Another example is the author's advice to "go with your gut," which I would respond by saying that our gut (our biases) often lead us to suboptimal decisions. I recommend reading about cognitive biases and heuristics, either Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters or Thinking, Fast and Slow. The author uses an example of selecting a babysitter (in chapter 6), describing how they would prefer to work with an unqualified person that they know over a highly qualified stranger. This shocked me, a very empirically rigorous foundation exists supporting the use of systems and standardization rather than personal biases and preferences. Surely the author doesn't hire employees merely by considering her personal relationships with the candidates. If you want to learn more about this, look up structured interviews to see why they have higher validity than unstructured interviews. The author claims that "meandering may be fine for some people, but leadership is a choice you work toward with purpose," but reality demonstrates that plenty of people are thrust into the role of leader, or otherwise act as leaders without have purposefully planned to do so. Some people purposefully plan their leadership paths, but some people simply happen to be in the right place at the right time.
For the few citations she did have, they were mostly industry websites, blog posts, news articles, with only a smattering of academic papers. I was surprised to see citations to websites that sell golf balls and to a listicle from Forbes.com. I normally wouldn't have such a high standard for citations for a non-academic book, but she has a doctorate and a few published academic articles.
Overall, this book seems to be hodgepodge of personal anecdotes, statements without any supporting evidence, and an overall poor conceptualization of leadership.
This entire book felt like a motivational speaker. Some element of that isn't so bad, but there was far too much of it. I could imagine much of it coming out of someone like Tony Robinson. Reading this book felt like like listening to a median TED Talk for multiple hours. There is lots of research on leadership, including leader-member exchange theory, trait-focused approached, behavior-focused approaches, and contingency theories. But this book didn't even touch on those well-researched concepts, and instead repeatedly emphasized that being relatable is the important thing. If you want to really learn about leadership, I think you would be better off reading the book Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time, or reading a few academic papers on leadership:
• Haslam, S. A., Alvesson, M., & Reicher, S. D. (2024). Zombie leadership: Dead ideas that still walk among us. The Leadership Quarterly, 101770.
• Hogan, R., & Kaiser, R. B. (2005). What we know about leadership. Review of general psychology, 9(2), 169-180.
Another thing that I didn't like was how the book appeared to be written for people that are wealthy and well-resourced. Phrases like "from that moment, I realized that I didn’t have to stay in a job that didn’t add value to my day," made it clear to me that the author is in a different work situation than the majority of people in the world, most of whom cannot leave a job without causing vast financial stress. Phrases like "there is nothing holding you back but you" seemed to ignore reality: if you are wealthy and well-networked and have an impressive pedigree then such a phrase might be more true, but think of someone undergoing cancer treatments, or someone dealing with discrimination and prejudice, or simply someone without many marketable skills or financial assets. Such phrases seem so bland and vague as to be useless. The author also described Atlas Shrugged in laudatory and uncritical terms.
There were also statements in the book that are active areas of research without any conclusive results, yet the author made claims as if they were simple truths. One example was "racial and ethnic diversity promotes active thinking skills and intellectual engagement." That can be true in some circumstances, but it is very context dependent and is moderated by other factors. If you don't want to take my word for it, I will appeal to authority: here is a quote from a Nobel prize winning economist (Esther Duflo) from the Handbook of economic field experiments: "homogenous groups are more productive (since communication within them is faster and easier). More homogeneous groups will create a trusting environment where people can work better together." Another example is the author's advice to "go with your gut," which I would respond by saying that our gut (our biases) often lead us to suboptimal decisions. I recommend reading about cognitive biases and heuristics, either Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters or Thinking, Fast and Slow. The author uses an example of selecting a babysitter (in chapter 6), describing how they would prefer to work with an unqualified person that they know over a highly qualified stranger. This shocked me, a very empirically rigorous foundation exists supporting the use of systems and standardization rather than personal biases and preferences. Surely the author doesn't hire employees merely by considering her personal relationships with the candidates. If you want to learn more about this, look up structured interviews to see why they have higher validity than unstructured interviews. The author claims that "meandering may be fine for some people, but leadership is a choice you work toward with purpose," but reality demonstrates that plenty of people are thrust into the role of leader, or otherwise act as leaders without have purposefully planned to do so. Some people purposefully plan their leadership paths, but some people simply happen to be in the right place at the right time.
For the few citations she did have, they were mostly industry websites, blog posts, news articles, with only a smattering of academic papers. I was surprised to see citations to websites that sell golf balls and to a listicle from Forbes.com. I normally wouldn't have such a high standard for citations for a non-academic book, but she has a doctorate and a few published academic articles.
Overall, this book seems to be hodgepodge of personal anecdotes, statements without any supporting evidence, and an overall poor conceptualization of leadership.
December 23, 2023
Many of the concepts and examples felt unnecessarily repetitive within the chapter to convey that topic. I would have felt better if the book was shortened to 150 pages max. The overall topic was decent but only certain chapter topics felt the most relevant.
November 2, 2022
This book first stroke my interest because of a new opportunity I had been offered at work and at which I wanted to excel, but I quickly realised there was more to be learnt here other than skills for my career.
What I learnt in 'There is No Box' are things I'll be sure to keep in mind in all dimensions of my life. As I was reading it, I felt the need to keep writing down notes so I wouldn't forget the pearls of wisdom I felt I was being handed:
From understanding the importance of different stakeholders in each situation, to the focus I should put into living through different experiences so I become my most relatable and agile self, to realising which goals are truly important in the long run, to applying the project management approach to my life, to merging your various personalities so you are one and the same (truly yourself) in your work and personal life, to something as simple as viewing small talk as a way to build a lasting relationship whereas before this was something I was incapable of and felt was nothing more than a superfluous nicety required by polite society with no useful purpose.
All in all, this book has allowed me to see where I have allowed for imbalances between different areas of life and I believe it has provided some invaluable tools to evolve into my most relatable self not only for myself but also for all that surround me.
What I learnt in 'There is No Box' are things I'll be sure to keep in mind in all dimensions of my life. As I was reading it, I felt the need to keep writing down notes so I wouldn't forget the pearls of wisdom I felt I was being handed:
From understanding the importance of different stakeholders in each situation, to the focus I should put into living through different experiences so I become my most relatable and agile self, to realising which goals are truly important in the long run, to applying the project management approach to my life, to merging your various personalities so you are one and the same (truly yourself) in your work and personal life, to something as simple as viewing small talk as a way to build a lasting relationship whereas before this was something I was incapable of and felt was nothing more than a superfluous nicety required by polite society with no useful purpose.
All in all, this book has allowed me to see where I have allowed for imbalances between different areas of life and I believe it has provided some invaluable tools to evolve into my most relatable self not only for myself but also for all that surround me.
April 20, 2024
Having studied leadership development as a graduate student, I’ve read a number of books on the topic. And I can say that this is one of the most influential and enjoyable ones I have found.
I love the concept of taking a leadership approach to my own life, and cultivating personal experiences that will help me best relate to (and lead) those around me. It’s extremely empowering and honors my unique leadership goals.
I find Marisa and Simon to be a living embodiment of this philosophy. This shines authentically throughout the text, in not only their theoretical knowledge, but their personal practices. A transformative read!
I love the concept of taking a leadership approach to my own life, and cultivating personal experiences that will help me best relate to (and lead) those around me. It’s extremely empowering and honors my unique leadership goals.
I find Marisa and Simon to be a living embodiment of this philosophy. This shines authentically throughout the text, in not only their theoretical knowledge, but their personal practices. A transformative read!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews