The Soul of Leadership: Unlocking Your Potential for Greatness

Deepak Chopra, a physician and international leader in alternative medicine, has synthesized a 7-point platform for better leadership of organizations. The Soul of Leadership builds on and updates Chopra's many previous books on better health and holistic living. This should interest physicians because much of the book deals with stress management—conquering one's own stresses and nurturing others through their stresses to guide a group and its individuals to better performance.

Chopra is an India-born internist who mostly trained in the United States and first became famous as an early advocate of mind-body medicine. He left his academic endocrinology practice in Boston to become a student of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and relocated to San Diego to head mind-body programs for Sharp Healthcare. He later founded the Chopra Center for Well Being in La Jolla, California, and has become a motivational speaker in high demand. Chopra's critics have pointed out that he has become wealthy advocating theories of self-enlightenment on the radio and in his best-selling books. He was awarded the puckish “Ig Nobel Prize” in 1998 for “his unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness.” More recently he has become a member of the teaching faculty of the prestigious Kellogg Business School at Northwestern University, applying his teachings to the training of future corporate leaders.

The themes of the book are similar in some ways to those of popular books such as The Energy Bus by Jon Gordon and The On-Purpose Person and The On-Purpose Business by Kevin McCarthy, in that they refocus the leader and team on purpose-driven lives and elimination of negative thinking and actions in the self and in the workplace. Chopra wisely departs from platitudes to interview 2 chief executive officers, a woman and a man, whose stories embody purpose-driven leadership. Both rose from humble beginnings to create companies with hundreds of employees and stakeholders. Readers will find their stories, from outside of health care, abundant with analogies to the challenges physicians face as health care leaders, whether they have 3 or 3000 persons following their lead.

The upshot of the book for practicing physicians and physician leaders is that attitude and balance must be manifested for success in small organizations, such as solo physician practices, and in larger organizations with thousands of employees, such as integrated delivery systems. These attitudes and balances, cultivated within the self, are leveraged as organizing power, which is positively infectious to coworkers and customers. Chopra teaches that successful leaders must cultivate listening skills, emotional intelligence regarding coworkers, self-awareness, and a balanced sense of what to do vs what to delegate (which Chopra calls “nondoing”). Throughout the first third of the book, Chopra discusses additional principles and acronyms in detail.

Additionally, Chopra explains how stress management is important for leaders. He explains simple techniques of meditation and breathing that can help one begin the day with increased inner peace and balance. He advocates finding time each day for a brief moment of meditation in one's private office. For leaders who are religious, he approves of prayer as practiced in one's religious tradition. He does not judge leaders who are not religious, instead urging them to use these techniques to cultivate their brain functions for better neurochemical balance.

In the final chapter, Chopra synthesizes 10 useful kernels of insight. Although these principles are common to many books on leadership, they nevertheless are worth rereading and reflecting on. The book has many messages similar to those found in John Maxwell's 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership ; however, The Soul of Leadership gets to the same place by citing widely differing Eastern and essentially Hindu traditions and concepts.

Some readers will find parts of The Soul of Leadership overly mystical. The author's intention is to be more profound and spiritual in ways that can convince atheists, skeptics, scientists, and followers of organized religions that purpose-driven leadership is the best path to greater effectiveness. The language in the interviews of the successful chief executive officers is poetic and insightful. One of the officers epitomizes the book's message, saying that “If I were a sailboat, emotional bonding would be my boat, empowerment would be my sail, and responsibility would be my rudder” (p 209). She selects these principles as the most important of Chopra's 7 principles. This book provides a thoughtful primer for physician leaders on how to enhance and channel their listening skills and may serve as a pathway to further reading, reflection, self-development, meditation, and effectiveness.