About the Author:

Dwight Johnson resides in Colorado Springs where he works at the United States Air Force Academy. He is a retired Air Force Lt. Colonel who was a Squadron Commander three times and a Division Chief twice. He also served as the Department Head of Services at the Air Force Institute of Technology, where he taught Customer Service and Total Quality Service.

​In 2012, Dwight was awarded the General Billy J Boles Mentorship Award for the Air Force Academy for mentoring cadets.

About the Book:

Ethics are a growing concern in all sectors of American culture. From businesses to all levels of schooling, as well as nonprofit companies, the values that guide business and teaching criteria are under scrutiny. But, does it take a scholarly textbook to understand how to create an ethical culture? No, Dwight Johnson has delved into the problems and presents practical solutions in his easy to read book, The Ethical Coach Leader: Developing Honor and Integrity.

A fiction book that has universal application, Johnson creates an intriguing story about a college coach who finds out that his star athlete failed a steroid test, putting the coach in the cross hairs of an ethical dilemma. During a couple of restless nights of sleep, Coach is visited by five ghosts: the Ghost of Example, the Ghost of Education, the Ghost of Experience, the Ghost of E-information, and the Ghost of Environment. Each has different advice for Coach on how to resolve his ethical dilemma. With the dreams haunting his every waking moment, Coach also seeks advice from two of his former mentors. The lessons Coach learns can be applied to any industry, business, school or individual life.

The Ethical Coach Leader challenges cultural mindsets and introduces new ideas on how to apply desperately needed teachings in ethics, integrity, honor and good character. This is a must read book for anyone who has influence on others or is in a leadership role.

Book Review:

This is a tough one to review.

On the one hand it discusses such an important topic: the development of honor and integrity, and the leading role a coach has to play in this regard.  There are some interesting points made in this book about this process; for one, that although experience, education, examples from the past, one’s social environment, and information found on the internet are important tools for an ethical coach leader, they are definitely not enough; it takes the oftentimes very painful art of introspection for someone to be able to use these tools to elevate one’s position from just a coach to an ethical one or to an ethical coach leader.

This is all the more striking in a world where everything seems to be geared to go faster and faster every day.  Ironically enough, we are given the tools to do our work more quickly and efficiently, which you would think would give us more time to reach deep within ourselves and arise to higher levels of functioning.  But instead, we pack our days with more and more things to do, things to see, things to watch, things to read.  The Ethical Coach Leader can read as a call to slow down enough to take the time needed for some much needed introspection, so that instead of doing more, we can learn to do it better—much better, in fact.

But on the other hand, there is something a little awkward about the way the entire thing is presented.  For one, the dreams within the story within the moral makes the entire experience a little more difficult to immerse oneself in.  I personally believe in the power and role of fiction to relay very important messages such as the one in this book, but it has to be done in a way that is relatable.  I would love to see a rewrite of this book in which Coach, instead of being visited, much like Scrooge, by ghosts (in this case, five of them), to have the opportunity to have in-depth conversations with various friends and colleagues—including and especially his wife, who would no doubt have invaluable insights into her husband’s character—so that we can get to know Coach better as well as explore with him the lessons the ghosts were trying to teach him.

All in all, this is still a book worth reading, especially if you are looking into how to elevate your contribution to the discourse around ethics both in the sports world as well as in any domain you are passionate about.

Thank you to iReads Book Tours for providing a copy of this book for me to review!