Flashing Seven by Jack Hirschowitz and Ahron Friedberg

Flashing Seven:  The Seven Essential Skills for Living and Leading is about leadership, an important subject for our times.  Specifically, it addresses the question of how a person can best live and lead his or her life.  We take an approach based in learning and developing seven essential skills to achieve excellence in your chosen path.  Each skill is playfully labeled as a “ball” because a main metaphor of the book is juggling–keeping your balls in the air.

The seven essential skills we emphasize and elaborate on are as follows:

• Ball 1: Harmonize In order to be in harmony with the world, you need to gain a perspective on your life and on your priorities. In this chapter, we help teach planning and taking responsibility for both your successes and your failures. Emphasized is the importance of finding a balance between personal life and career, managing time and responsibilities, and improving organizational skills.
• Ball 2: Upload Becoming a continuous learner is central to leading your best life. We help you learn to recognize and change problematic, habitual patterns. You will discover that making mistakes can be a good thing in terms of learning from experience. You are never too old to learn. In fact, you will find that your brain can get better with age if you become a lifelong learner. We’ll help you develop the art of relaxed concentration. Most importantly, you’ll learn to add humor and fun to your approach.
• Ball 3: Energize In order to succeed in leading your life, you will need to take care of yourself to the best of your ability.  his chapter will teach you the latest and most important information about exercise, diet, and staying younger longer. You will learn how to harness your energy and get the most out of each day.
• Ball 4: Enlighten Being open to new ideas and not simply accepting the status quo is essential for self-improvement. We will help orient you to thinking in terms of solutions, not problems;  taking measured risks, and rewarding risk taking; and seeing the world in realistic but positive light. The key ingredient is what we call “Spirit,” which we define in terms of passion, conviction, and optimism.
• Ball 5: Listen Building relationships based on trust and respect allows a person to lead more effectively. So does becoming a better communicator. The single most significant ingredient in building successful relationships is the ability to listen. Listening is both an art and a skill and can be learned and cultivated with practice.
• Ball 6: Excel Leadership involves achieving excellence for yourself and others. In this chapter, you learn to maintain cutting edge skills, to measure the outcome of your work, and to use available technology and resources to push the envelope. We teach you how do become a masterful conductor of your own life and do your personal best.
• Ball 7: Lead The final chapter helps you to bring it all together and lead for yourself. You learn to keep all your balls in the air at the same time–seeing the big picture while keeping an eye on the individual balls. We show you how to be an outstanding role model, coach, and mentor. So you can help others to follow your lead.

Flashing Seven is part of the “success” and “self-help” genre. It should appeal to a similar audience as Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Jack Canfield’s The Success Principles. It has an academic basis and psychological, cognitive-behavioral orientation.