The book
Character Driven Leadership
Fourteen years of notes on why some of the people around him kept rising and others quietly stopped, written down in 2016. Everything in this program — the twelve traits, the five regions, the way a symptom is read backwards to its cause — comes out of it.
A second edition is being written now. Nineteen chapters against the first edition's seventeen, and about a third longer, because two things arrived in ten years: a diagnostic method that the first edition implied but never taught, and research the author could not find when he wrote it.
The first edition
Published in 2016 and still in print. It is the book the program was built out of, and the second edition revises it rather than replacing what it argues.
Read one, free
The Five Checks
Chapter four, and the chapter that did not exist in the first edition. Somebody stops you in the hallway and says the work did not get done. Again. That sentence hands you a result and never the cause. This is the method for going the other way — from what you were handed, to the region, to the trait underneath it — including the test that tells you when your diagnosis is wrong.
What the second edition changes
The instrument comes before the inventory
The first edition diagnosed and interpreted. It never taught anyone how to run it backwards from the thing they were actually handed — a result, months late, with none of the story attached. That is the new chapter, and it moved ahead of the twelve traits because a map is worth less than the instrument you read it with.
Four names changed, for one reason
A trait is named for the character quality itself — never for its instrument, and never for its yield. The Five Leadership Objectives became the five regions, keeping the old titles as their descriptors. Trust became Trustworthy. Truth became Truth-seeking. Faithfulness/Obedience became Faithfulness, with obedience kept in the teaching where it belongs.
The research that was missing
Ten years ago the author looked for the evidence that character shows up in results and could not find it assembled anywhere. It exists. Where a claim in this program rests on a study, the study is named, dated and read — and where it is weaker than it sounds, we say so. That is published in full.
What did not change
The argument. Your principal actions are an extension of your character; every action has a consequence; you are living in the middle of the consequences you already caused. Nine of the twelve principles stand in the second edition word for word.
The three sentences that were rewritten
Each trait in the book carries one principle. Nine of the twelve are reprinted exactly as they were written. Three collided with a name that was retired, and the first edition's wording is kept underneath each one rather than quietly dropped.
Trustworthy
“Trustworthiness creates trust; trust creates security.”
First edition: “Trust creates security.”
Trust is what the trait produces. Naming the trait after its own yield hid the thing a person actually has to do.
Faithfulness
“Faithfulness creates honor.”
First edition: “Faithfulness and Obedience create honor.”
Obedience is how faithfulness gets carried out, not a second quality to hold. It stays in the teaching and comes out of the name.
Truth-seeking
“Better data gives you a better chance of making a better decision.”
First edition: “When you know the truth, you can make better decisions.”
The original promised the truth as something you arrive at and keep. The work is the looking, and the sentence now says so.
The program is the book taught over twenty-six weeks, with the practice the book could only describe.