'Leadership Test' makes grade, passes with flying colors

It's easy to dismiss books like Timothy R. Clark's second offering, "The Leadership Test: Will You Pass?" Plug the word "leadership" into Amazon and enjoy sifting through an intense 58,000 titles.

Clark, to his credit, has a meta-awareness of this and acknowledges early on that if every book on leadership was stacked on top of one another, the result would exceed Mt. Everest.

Yet Clark, an experienced adviser and speaker who acquired his doctorate from Oxford, was a first-team Academic All-American football player for BYU and is currently CEO of TRCLARK LLC, bothers to add to the stack.

We're fortunate he does.

Clark is able to help the defensive reader put a lid on cynicism and the offensive reader be more objective by keeping his messages simple and blunt.

There's no room in his wide-margined 100 pages for meaningless jargon or trite self-aggrandizements that pack the pages of many self-help books.

Through a frill-free parable about a dedicated, offbeat teacher named Izzy and one of his former students, an up-and-coming computer programmer named Marcus, Clark illustrates the forces separating real leaders from "fake" leaders.

"If you look at patterns of influence and intent, it's pretty easy to pick out the real leaders from the fake ones," Clark writes.

A real leader is defined by his or her answer to the central question of the book, "Why do you want to lead?"

Here is where Clark excels, taking a seemingly basic question and mining it for all its potential; our answer either denotes self-interest or stewardship but he never comes off as a didactic detractor, wagging a finger at our egotism.

Instead, Clark's motivation seems to be to gently demonstrate how lessons in leadership are not only relevant in the boardroom, but in family situations — and in our personal lives.

"You're in charge of leading yourself," writes Clark. "Do you have any idea how magnificent it would be if people could lead themselves?"

At the book's close, though the ending for Izzy and Marcus might come off as sugar-sweet, Clark provides five tests of leadership readers can "take" that play on the practical, step-by-step lists outlined in the narrative.

Even if we were to fail the tests initially (I sure did), Clark leaves us feeling refreshed and confident about bettering life situations for both others and ourselves.E-mail: eschmuhl@desnews.com