Response to the reading on Heroic Leadership

The first reading on this book taught me a good amount of who Jesuits are. Although it takes a business point of view on the matter, I see how it can relate to Jesuits. I learned that they were a group of ambitious people who had a goal and worked for it with haste, all in the name of God.

Like Ignatius, the author had an epiphany. The epiphany lead to him writing this book. The book would show people what it is to really be a leader by using the Jesuits as an example. He says Jesuits have revolutionary leadership principles and that these principles should not be limited to Jesuits, but applied to every-day life: “We can be leaders in everything we do” (5). An example of this said leadership applied by the Jesuits is that they were founded in 1540 by ten men, and within a decade they had more than thirty colleges established under their name.

The author says that now-days leadership is a superficial thing, whereas the Jesuits would use a more deep leadership style that could be defined as the four pillars of success: self-awareness, ingenuity, love, and heroism. These four pillars basically mean that a leader must: understand his/her strengths and weaknesses, adapt to the world, engage others in a positive attitude, and motivate others and themselves through ambitions.

In this chapter the reader finds out that you do not need to follow all these steps on how to become a leader to be one. People are leaders every day, in small or bigger things. The most important thing to take from this chapter is that you cannot talk about being a leader to be one, you have to live leadership.