The Book
Frank Newman’s book on leadership — built around the 5 Cs, and the idea that leadership turns on a few short, ordinary moments most managers let pass.
Most leaders don’t fail for lack of ambition or intelligence. They fail in the moments they didn’t see coming — a conversation that went sideways, a decision they put off too long, a person they never quite reached. After five decades working with leaders across Canada, Frank Newman keeps seeing the same pattern: what separates a good leader from a transformative one is rarely strategy. It’s how they show up in a single conversation — a ten-minute window where things pivot.
Your Best 10 Minutes is about those moments, and the five capacities that decide them: Connecting, Clarity, Compassion, Courage, and Coaching. Each works on its own; practised together, they’re a system.
Coming 2026 · not yet available to buy
Your Best 10 Minutes is a practical book about leadership, organised around five capacities Frank Newman calls the 5 Cs.
It’s written for the people who carry a team without a leadership title to hide behind — owners, founders, and managers promoted for being good at the job, not for being trained to lead. The premise is small on purpose: you rarely get a whole day to fix a team, but you almost always get ten minutes, and how you spend them is most of the job.
The 5 Cs — Connecting, Clarity, Compassion, Courage, and Coaching — are the spine. This site doesn’t reprint the book; it gives you the idea and then points you to the knowledge base, where each capacity is backed by the research and the practice. The voice is Frank’s, drawn from fifty years in the work — there’s more on his background on his profile.
From the book
Too often I have witnessed that a lack of courage, or the wrong kind of courage, can dramatically impact companies and careers.
Where to start
You don’t have to read it cover to cover to use it. Pick the door that fits what you need right now.
The book’s central framework — five leadership capacities, shown as one system, each linking to the evidence behind it.
Explore the 5 Cs ›Frank’s companion frameworks — the Rule of Three, Saints and Vampires, the Mirror of Courage — as plain tools you can use this week.
See the resources ›The sourced notes and guides underneath the ideas — the research, the Ontario specifics, and the how-to.
Open the knowledge base ›About the book
It’s a leadership book built on a simple premise: you rarely get a whole day to fix a team, but you almost always get ten minutes — and how you spend them is what leadership comes down to. The spine is the 5 Cs: Connecting, Clarity, Compassion, Courage, and Coaching.
The 5 Cs ›Owners, founders, and managers who carry a team without a formal leadership background — the people most leadership books skip. No jargon, no theory for its own sake; plain ideas you can act on.
About the author ›It’s forthcoming in 2026 and not yet available to buy. You can ask for the preview chapter and we’ll let you know the moment it launches — no list to join, no spam.
Ask about the preview chapter ›Not at all. The book is how Frank thinks; the consulting is how he puts it to work. Plenty of the people he works with have never read a page of it.
How Frank works with teams ›The knowledge base
Before the book
The ideas in Your Best 10 Minutes are already how Frank works with teams across Ontario. If something here lands, that’s usually the place to start a conversation.
