Lead Like Jesus Revisited: Lessons from the Greatest Leadership Role Model of All Time is a 272-page book from Thomas Nelson, published in 2016.
Three authors, and the one this page dropped is the reason it exists
This page credited Ken Blanchard alone. The book is by Ken Blanchard, Phil Hodges, and Phyllis Hendry.
Blanchard is the famous name, co-author of The One Minute Manager. Phil Hodges spent thirty-six years in human resources and industrial relations at Xerox and U.S. Steel, and cofounded the Lead Like Jesus ministry with Blanchard. Phyllis Hendry is the president and CEO of Lead Like Jesus, and she was added as an author for this revision.
That last point matters. Hendry’s contribution is a large part of what makes this the Revisited edition rather than a reprint. Dropping her name does not just miscredit her, it removes the answer to the obvious question of what is new here.
It is a revised edition, so check your shelf
The original Lead Like Jesus came out in 2005. This is a full revision of that book, not a sequel and not a new argument.
If you already own the 2005 edition, you are looking at an update rather than new material. If you do not, buy this one, since it is the current version.
The framework
Blanchard, Hodges and Hendry organize leadership into four domains and work through them in order:
- Heart, meaning motive. Are you leading to serve or to be served
- Head, your actual beliefs about leadership and where they came from
- Hands, what you do, the behavior people experience
- Habits, what keeps you from drifting back
Two questions run underneath the whole thing: whose are you, and who are you. The first is about who owns you, and the authors’ answer is that a leader who belongs to Christ is freed from needing his position to tell him he matters. The second follows from it.
The heart section is where the book earns its keep. It argues that most leadership failure is not a skills problem but an ego problem, and that a man who needs his role to feel significant will inevitably use the people under him to get that feeling. That is uncomfortable and correct.
What we removed
Two quotations presented as reader reviews, neither of which we could verify, and an invented scenario about men gathering to study the book. The four domains, the two questions, the 2016 Thomas Nelson publication, and the author credits are all confirmed and stay.
An honest limitation
Blanchard comes from the secular management world and it shows, for better and worse. The structure is clean and memorable, which is a real strength. It also means Jesus sometimes functions as the best available leadership case study rather than as Lord, and the fit between a business framework and the gospels is occasionally forced.
Read it as a useful frame rather than as exegesis. Jesus did not come primarily to model management, and the book is strongest when it remembers that.
Who it fits
Anyone leading people who wants a structure for thinking about it: managers, pastors, elders, small-group leaders, and fathers who are willing to hear that leading at home is the same problem in a different room. It works well in a group, since the heart material is far more useful when someone can push back on your answers.
Lead Like Jesus Revisited on Amazon