Review: Vocal Leadership: 7 Minutes a Day to Communication Mastery, with a Foreword by Roger Goodell

Vocal Leadership: 7 Minutes a Day to Communication Mastery, with a Foreword by Roger Goodell by Arthur Samuel Joseph
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Authors of books that purport to teach the reader something that also happen to offer consulting or training in the same topic have to walk a fine line. They likely make more money on their day-to-day work than on sales of their book, so they often use the book to introduce the concepts but don’t provide an entire package that would allow the reader to fully embrace the topic without paying for additional courses or consulting. I’ve read quite a few books recently that have provided a lot of value in terms of teaching how to accomplish something without requiring hiring the author to help, and I tend to reward those books with better evaluations. Here, this isn’t the case.

The author provides some very basic processes to work on vocal strength. He does this in two ways. First, there are a series of vocal exercises that he describes. This sounds good, but was a very small part of the book. I listened to this book’s audio version, and that likely helped me understand exactly the kinds of vocal sounds that were for practice. Think Eliza Doolittle’s elocution lessons in “My Fair Lady” – most of the exercises were similar. They were also similar to the exercises I learned in Junior High Chorus. Again, this was only a small part of the text. The second way to “embrace your vocal mastery” was to follow a set of rules. You’ve likely heard many of these rules from your parents. Stand up straight. Breathe. Project when you speak. These rules might have some value, but seemed quite generic.

Most of the book, unfortunately, related anecdotes about “vocal mastery”. I enjoyed some of these, including the author’s retelling of the story behind “The King’s Speech”. But many of the anecdotes highlighted the author, and there were enough of these to make the book feel like a long written advertisement for the author’s classes. The classes are mentioned quite often, so you understand that they are the purpose of the book. In fact the structure of the book is such that the rules and exercises content are surrounded, before, after, and in between, with what seems to be advertisement. This isn’t bad in and of itself depending on the actionable content, but here the actionable content felt a bit lacking. The rules seemed too generic, the exercises seemed incomplete. Good for a taste of elocution lessons, but you’ll need to wade through a lot of sales pitch.


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