Author – Jackie Fast
I think it is fitting this review coincides Hilda Baci breaking the Guinness World Record (GWR) for marathon cooking, beating the record set in 2019 by Lata Tondon. Cooking for 100 hours at a stretch is the kind of rebellious leadership that Jackie wrote about in this fascinating book. The first captivating sentence read in the book was in the introduction. Jackie says, “We are all obsessed with how the world is becoming vastly different from the world we used to know. But it is not the how part that you need to be preoccupied with. It is the why part of the shift that is particularly important to you.
As Pastor Emmanuel Oleka, resident pastor of the Transforming Church Lagos Island said recently, “we do not have control over time and changes around us, but the ability to determine what happens overtime is within our grasp”. So, Jackie’s message is simple. New leadership requires breaking all the rules. While this assertion is rarely new, it is the simple way Jackie, using her personal experiences, breaks down the message that one will find most interesting. Reading the book, it becomes clear that breaking the rules is not for “exceptional people”. It can be learnt, cultivated, and become habitual.
By continuously asking why, and in some cases, asking why not, Jackie demonstrated how she and the other examples in this terrific book have broken all the rules (certain assumptions and expectations) and achieving previously thought unachievable things. Jackie argued that we are now in a world with no boundaries, except those set by ourselves. Finally, a favourite topic in business and life – execution. Jackie showed in her book that because life is usually in repetitions and patterns, the ability to continuously improve and doing things better will make us exceptional.
