“Choose Love Not Fear” by Gary and Ryan Heil

Exploring leadership and its ever-changing mandate in modern life is one of business non-fiction’s abiding topics. Leading thinkers in the areas of management, organizational culture, and leadership, Gary and Ryan Heil set high standards for this book and meet them all. They rose to the challenge through a variety of methods but making a point to touch base and discuss the intricacies of leading a business large, medium, or small. Their book Choose Love Not Fear: How the Best Leaders Build Cultures of Engagement and Innovation that Unleash Human Potential presents a new vision for modern leadership incorporate traditional values and ideas born from our unique moment in history.

BLOG: http://www.garyheil.com/blog

Its questions and ideas about leadership are especially relevant in 2020 with an upcoming United States Presidential election and the COVID-19 virus continuing to wreak global havoc. Corporation and businesses help shape the communities they are involved in and the writers adopt a comprehensive approach when discussing the paths available for leadership to get the best results. Choose Love Not Fear does not shy away from some social commentary layered into its discussion of modern leadership, but the Heils never come across as strident and heavy-footed.

The lack of supplemental material in the text is surprising. Books of this ilk tend to include at least a handful of supporting illustrations, but Choose Love Not Fear relies instead on its prose and the merits of its argument. This is a testament to the confidence they have in the research and ideas dominating the text. The confidence never means arrogance, however. They have put an enormous amount of work into realizing the potential in this book and make their case in well-nigh irrefutable terms.  

They document the wealth of research they put into this text. The book’s prose maintains a strong conversational slant despite the subject matter and the Heil’s choices in language are never ornate but, instead, pointed and attune to the topic at hand. This extends for the point of view guiding much of Choose Love Not Fear. The authors never disrespect their readers, but their observations about what does and does not work are unsparing.

AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/Choose-Love-Not-Fear-Engagement/dp/1734105135

I think this book can reach a much wider audience than those in leadership positions alone. Leaders appear in all sorts of ways in our lives; there are those who take such roles in a group of friends, romantic relationships, and so forth. It isn’t just the business world. This is part of the human dynamic; Gary and Ryan Heil understand it better than many. Their vast experiences in the areas mentioned in the first paragraph equip them in an unique way to write this book. It is unlikely another writer or tandem would arrive at the same conclusions or be willing to invest the same effort into making this book work. Choose Love Not Fear: How the Best Leaders Build Cultures of Engagement and Innovation that Unleash Human Potential will stand for some time as a definitive word on leadership in the modern marketplace.

Nicole Killian