Do you want to lead?

7 Principles of Becoming a Leader is the only book of its kind that covers everything you need to do to become a leader. The comprehensive method outlined in this book will guide you through all the essential principles of building a successful management career:

• Professional development: Personal excellence and productivity
• Leadership development: Mindset and essential leadership skills
• Personal development: Your identity and character as a leader
• Career development and management: Get promoted and well paid 
• Social skills and networking: Work with the right people
• Business- and company understanding: The big picture 
• Commitment: Decide and commit to become a good leader

There never has been a clear rulebook for becoming a leader and building a management career, so for most it all seems to be mainly based on luck and whims of your bosses, rather than something you can actually control by yourself.

However, there is an ocean of essential knowledge, insights and strategy needed for building a successful leadership career. Most people are completely unaware of this, as this is not taught in traditional leadership books, and the essential information is scattered around dozens of different sources and minds of the leaders who already made it.

7 Principles of Becoming a Leader's purpose is to change all that. It starts from the very beginning of the leadership journey and takes you through every step to becoming a leader who is in control of their work, career, and life.

Riku Vuorenmaa is successful corporate leader and executive coach. The methods he teaches in this book have been developed, tested and proven in real corporate environments.

From the Author

Hundreds of books have been written about leadership, and while there are great books out there, and I have learned a lot from them, the one problem I have with most of them is that they talk about leaders on a huge scale. These books usually draw their inspiration and learnings from the CEOs and founders of the multi-billion-dollar corporations rather than focusing on the most common pathways to leadership and management work: Rising through the ranks in a company that you work in.

The reality is that most of us are not founding the next Google, Microsoft, or Starbucks, at least not in the beginning of our leadership careers. Most of us work for someone else by our own choice, and thus we need advice and insights on how to become leaders and how to get started with successful and fulfilling management careers within this setup. Chances are that you will never become a great business leader or a founder if you don't even know what the first steps are to get started.

Books based on the examples and experiences of high-level leaders set the bar for the leadership journey extremely high. This can easily discourage anyone from even considering taking the first crucial steps as a leader, as everything you read just seems to be a million miles away from your current reality. Way too often, after reading a book like this, you don't have anything concrete to put into action at work to start building yourself up as a leader and a top candidate for the next available promotion opportunity.

In other words, trying to become a leader and starting your management career using the standard books of leadership and management theory out there is pretty much like studying the building process of Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, when you are planning to build a garden shed behind your house. You will waste your time and get completely overwhelmed trying to learn about the intricacies of building with high density steel at 800 meters above the ground, when you would in reality need only to learn how to plan a basic wooden shed with a saw and a hammer.

This book is designed to be something different. We will start with the garden shed and make sure you get it right. Most importantly, we will make sure you get started in the first place. But don't worry, doing this will also set you on the right path to think about building skyscrapers someday if you wish to.

That said, the one single goal of this book is to show you how to become a leader in your current job and then quickly accelerate your career advancement towards management positions, equipped with a solid plan and all the essential insights that will not only make your success possible, but inevitable.

Riku Vuorenmaa