Love Leadership By Hope

LOVE LEADERSHIP is a book about how leading with love and respect creates success in business and life. Love and respect are two universal core values that humans can share and activate, in a virulent climate.

John Hope Bryant is the founder of Operation HOPE and advisor to the past two U.S. presidents. In 1992, at the age of 26, John Hope Bryant was running a successful financial services firm when the Los Angeles riots broke out. After the violence and chaos subsided, Bryant saw that his community needed a ‘hand up, not a handout,’ so he founded Operation HOPE, an organization dedicated to helping low-wealth communities attain financial literacy empowerment. Today, Bryant is a philanthropic entrepreneur who is a sought-after speaker recognized for his leadership and service around the world.

Love Leadership outlines Bryant's five laws of love-based leadership: Loss Creates Leaders (there can be no strength without legitimate suffering); Fear Fails (only respect and love leads to success); Love Makes Money (love is at the core of true wealth); Vulnerability is Power (when you open up to people they open up to you); and Giving is Getting (the more you offer to others, the more they will give back to you). The last of his laws works infinitely well with love and respect. Offer respect first and you will receive it in abundance.

In Love Leadership, Bryant chronicles his story of transformation from a teenager growing up in South Los Angeles to the leader of one of the most impressive antipoverty organizations in the country, and shares the unlikely ingredient for his leadership success: love. He shows leaders how to break away from the long-standing leadership style that is based on fear. In management science, we call this Coercive Power. Instead of leading with threats and coercion, he suggests that the best way to lead in both your professional and personal life is to figure out what you have to give others in a world obsessed with the question ‘what do I get?’

This book is readable as it connects sound business advice, financial literacy, and inspirational stories. This is a book aimed at Generation Y (15-30 years old) where it is fast, furious and confusing at times. It cautions us about reckless short-term gains, and the need to focus on one important asset we have: our life. Bryant preaches his observed and applied leadership with a contrarian view and approach. He emphasizes personal and professional values that can help enhance the value of both the leader and his followers. He refers to financial literacy as the ‘new civil rights’.

Bryant draws on his personal success story as well as interviews with love-based leaders such as Former President Bill Clinton, Bill George, and Andrew Young.