Bury My Heart at Conference Room B: The Unbeatable Impact of Truly Committed Managers

“This shouldn’t be a book,” declares Stan Slap, 13 pages into Bury My Heart in Conference Room B: The Unbeatable Impact of Truly Committed Managers, “it should be a pamphlet.”

That’s for the reader to decide. Form aside, Bury My Heart is an engaging, sometimes infuriating, sure-to-be provocative collection of Slap’s thoughts on how managers can make the difficult transition on their way to becoming leaders. And why this transformation is important to any company.

He begins with a rousing premise: that “the heart of a company’s performance is hardwired to the hearts of its managers.” Which is to say that, for Slap, the company that can garner emotional commitment from its employees—especially from its managers—will have found the critical element for success.

How can companies make this happen? By freeing their managers to live their personal values. In the workplace.

Slap is a generally smart, funny, and engaging writer, and as a former CEO, current president of an international consultancy, and man-of-a-thousand-impressive blurbs, he’s apparently had great success.
But be warned, the first third of the book is long on collected accolades and screed. Have patience. Despite the protracted start, managers and organizational leaders will likely find this theory worth understanding and ultimately fighting for. After all, as the book declares, in the worst of corporate cultures, “managers make the conscious choice to fade back. They deliberately leave the best of who they are at home when they suit up every day for the detachment factory.” And who aspires to run a company like that? Instead, insists Slap, “what’s needed is a model that will reliably allow managers to live their values at work without the company having to constantly facilitate the process.” What’s needed, he goes on to say, is a group of real leaders: “people who live their deepest personal values, without compromise.”

Pretty motivating stuff. Especially since he promises to teach each of us how to truly lead by living our own values.

Too often, “must-read” business tomes start strong, and lapse after three or four chapters into repetition. Refreshingly, Bury My Heart actually switches to a higher gear once it moves from the theoretical to the practical.

No longer self-consciously insisting that his way is The Best Way—“. . . the highest-rated management solution in a number of the world’s highest-rated companies”—nor taking bizarre side trips to the scientific, without proof source—“. . . the amygdala urgently assumes danger response mode and dopamine is halted in favor of the release of detachment chemicals”—Slap makes good on his promise to get concrete.

Every one of us in business has likely, at one point or at many, helped a company identify what its core values are in an effort to create a sustainable business model. If we’ve worked for a relatively progressive company, the effort was even tied into creating a corporate culture with the best working conditions (and not coincidentally, helping that company succeed at critical success factors such as lowered employee turnover or greater profitability). Bury My Heart challenges managers to ask: Do my personal values have anything to do with how I have to live at work?

Of course, as Slap points out, it’s hard to know the answer to the question if you’re not sure what your values are. So, step by step, the reader is pushed to identify, with clarity, what his or her core values are, to commit to them, and then to sell them to their people, their management.

Like a good therapist, Slap knows his audience (near-leaders who haven’t quite made the transition to leaders and the management that loves them) is filled with just the kind of intelligent, cautious, skeptics who will see all the reasons not to make the transition. So, from “I don’t have what it takes,” to “my company won’t buy it,” and “my people have different values than I do,” he lines up the objections and attends to them, one by one. And since his audience is also made up of just the sort of skeptics who will not fall for the same trick twice, he goes at each objection in a different way each time.

The book is not without its weaknesses. It calls for managers to identify the value-defining Moment of Truth in their lives, but the examples it gives—childhoods filled with chronically ill parents, foster homes, torturous experimental cure for polio—imply that real leaders are from trauma born. It calls for managers to essentially practice these precepts on their partners, children, and/or friends in a way that feels tonally off. And, again, it demands patience at the start, with the less-than-confident litany of praise from others. None of this should deter you.

There’s a serious reward for Bury My Heart readers for making it to the end of the book: a (renewed) commitment to themselves first, the reminder that “you’re not prioritizing your values over [your teams’] . . . you’re prioritizing building a stable process for everyone to live their own,” and provided a game plan for putting it into action.

Even this most skeptical reviewer will admit it: This book may just give you a sense of what should be, what could be, and the motivation to push yourself and your organization to get there.