Should your team read The Leading Edge before Holly Ransom speaks?
What Holly Ransom's book covers, whether to bundle copies with your booking, and how to hand them out so people actually read them.
Should your team read The Leading Edge before Holly Ransom speaks?
What is The Leading Edge about?
The core argument is that leadership is not a position you get promoted into. Holly Ransom makes the case that most people spend years waiting for permission to lead, and that the permission never arrives.
The book is split into two halves:
Leading yourself. The first half, on the reasoning that you cannot be much use to other people until you have done some work on yourself.
Leading others. The second half, which builds on the first.
Three principles run through both halves: mindset, method and mastery.
Underneath the argument sits a lot of research. Ransom spent years interviewing people including Barack Obama, Condoleezza Rice, Susan Cain, Sir Richard Branson and Malcolm Gladwell. The book also draws on more than 70 case studies of leaders from around the world, many of whom are not famous. That choice is deliberate. The argument that leadership is available to everyone falls apart if every example runs a listed company.
Will the keynote just repeat the book?
No. This is the concern conference committees raise most often, and it does not play out in practice.
A book is something you read over a couple of weeks. A keynote is 45 minutes in front of an audience that has just come back from lunch. The two formats do completely different jobs, and a speaker at this level builds the session around your brief and your audience rather than working through their own contents page.
The real risk with pre-reading is the opposite one. It is not that your audience has already heard the material. It is that they never opened the book, and you have paid for hundreds of copies sitting in boxes behind the registration desk.
Should your team read it beforehand?
It depends entirely on the size and type of the group.
Large conference audience: no. Do not build any part of the session on the assumption they have read it. People fully intend to read the book, in the same way they intend to watch the pre-event video, and then the week gets away from them. If the speaker plans a session that assumes prior knowledge, you lose the first ten minutes to rebuilding context.
Leadership cohort or workshop group: yes. For a named group of roughly 20 to 40 people with a session and a follow-up attached, pre-reading genuinely works. A group that size carries enough accountability that most people get through it, and the discussion can start somewhere more interesting than the basics.
Send the book four to six weeks ahead. Two weeks is not enough for anyone with a full diary. Three months and they will have forgotten it.
Executive team: ask for less. Name two specific chapters rather than handing over the whole book. Nobody at that level reads 300 pages because it appeared in a calendar invite, and asking for something they will not do costs you credibility on the next thing you ask for.
