The Ideal Team Player

For the first main section of the book, after the Introduction, Lencioni is a third-person narrator, and there are no authorial interventions throughout “The Fable.” When “The Model” begins, Lencioni assumes a more instructional voice, and the book comes to resemble a typical self-help book.

Lencioni provides a few biographical details in “The Model,” especially regarding his corporate experience. To begin with, Lencioni was a cofounder of The Table Group, a consulting firm that specialized in providing guidance to leaders in companies in order to build better team dynamics. As part of this guidance, Lencioni had initially landed on the three core values of hunger, humility, and people smarts as the result of learning from what worked and what did not while in the field. Eventually, the three values were so effective that companies sought to appropriate the slogans for themselves.

Lencioni points out on multiple occasions that in his view, humility is the most important of the three core values, and readers learn toward the end of the book that this view is also partially informed by his belief in the model of Jesus Christ. Lencioni says, “The most compelling example of humility […] can be found in Christ […] He attracted people of all kinds when he walked the earth, and continues to do so today, providing an example of humility that is as powerful as it is countercultural” (215).