Tag Archives: book

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The Art of Leadership

Before you ask, yes, it is weird that I’m reading a bunch of “management” books.

You can watch Michael Lopp’s career by following his various books. Start with “Being Geek,” the software developer’s career handbook. The move into management resulted in “Managing Humans.” And his promotion from manager to director and executive gets you “The Art of Leadership,” which is the book I recently finished.

My career has not followed the same trajectory. I continue to be an “individual contributor,” so why would I read this book?

Two basic reasons. First, Lopp is a great writer. He wraps the lessons around relatable stories, even if they don’t exactly mirror my experience. Secondly, to use a cliché, leadership comes from everywhere. I may not manage people, but I do have to lead. As a consultant, my whole job involves influence, persuasion and strategy.

In short, I don’t think you have to be a manager to get something out of this book, but if you like to sit in the corner and code all day, it’s unlikely to be your thing.

The book is structured into three sections, manager, director and then executive. Within each section, there are a bunch of small things that, done well, will result in great results (hence the sub-title). There are so many great parts that it would be easy to quote the whole book. I’ll refrain, but here are a few highlights and observations.

There are parallels with other books I’ve read recently. Chapter 15 “Saying the hard thing,” covers a lot of the same ground as “Radical Candor,” with many of the same positives.

The “faux zone” is very relatable. There are certainly times when I feel incredibly busy, but at the end of the day, I don’t feel like I got anything done. There are insights here that make me feel better about it.

A “Precious Hour” reminds us that being busy is not the same as being productive.

And, finally, this is so me: “I love to start new things, but I often lose interest when I can mentally see how the thing is going to finish, which might be weeks or months before the thing is actually done. Sorry. I’m getting better at this.” I remember I did one of those “type indicator” tests a long time ago, and one of the categories was “completer-finisher.” I immediately knew that I was the opposite of that.

As with all books like this, some of the suggestions I already do while others are not relevant; however, taken as a whole, there’s plenty of good advice.

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Crisis? What Crisis?

Empty shops, rising prices, the laughing stock of Europe, our place in the world in question, people out of work and fuel shortages. But that’s enough about late 2021, I decided that I wanted to learn more about the Seventies, the decade that brought, well, me, the Winter of Discontent, power cuts, the three day week and shocking fashion sense. There are a few books that cover the same timeline, but I decided on “Crisis? What Crisis?”[affiliate link] by Alwyn W. Turner.

The book is in roughly chronological order, with occasional jumping around to make certain aspects make sense.

Despite being such relatively recent history, there are surprising volumes of material that are shocking, or at least uncomfortable. I know the name Enoch Powell and the phrase “rivers of blood,” of course, but even then the more detailed background is both depressing and familiar. The parallels with the modern anti-immigrant movement are obvious.

On the other hand, it made the rise of Margaret Thatcher more understandable to me. I’m not a fan of her politics but you can appreciate the desire to shake things up. Having said that, I thought her victory in the 1979 election was assured so it was fascinating to read that it wasn’t, and that had the election been called just a few months earlier things might have turned out differently.

Those looking for a change with Thatcher may not have realised what they were letting themselves in for. I guess I’ll have to read the next book about the Eighties to find out.

Looking back, the Seventies is often seen as a “lost” decade, which is why it’s nice that the book concludes with the upsides that we often don’t consider:

For most of the country, for most of the decade, times were really quite good. In retrospect, the 1970s can look like a period of comparative calm and stability. It was still possible for an average working-class family to live on a single wage, very few were required to work anti-social hours, and housing was affordable for most.

Almost by definition, I can’t say how complete the book is but I do get a much better feeling for the decade than I had before, which makes it worth the read.

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Talking to Strangers

I met a man once. He was tall and dark, with straight hair in parting on his left side. His smooth, fair skin contrasted with his choice of a dark, tailored suit. He rarely wore a tie, but in a small concession to whimsy his cuff links bore small images of Daffy Duck. When anyone noticed, he’d laugh it off, saying they were a gift from his youngest.

Sat in his office on the fifteenth floor of an anonymous office block in the City of London he had a realisation, one that would change his life forever.

The man is entirely fictional. But the last two paragraphs are real. So is this one. And you had to read them to get to the forth paragraph which is where, if you’re lucky, I might finally get to the point.

And the point is this.

There are a lot of words and not a lot to say. And that is my problem with Malcolm Gladwell’s “Talking to Strangers.”

It’s not that it’s bad. It’s easy to follow and read. It’s well written. There are some good ideas.

The difficulty is that it’s several hundred pages long, yet there are not several hundred pages worth of ideas. Each chapter uncovers a concept and then beats all the fun out of it by giving the life story of various people by way of an example.

It’s a fine structure but, wow, the ratio of words to ideas is way out of whack.

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How to

“If you convert [your car] to run on copies of this book instead of gas, it will burn through 30,000 words per minute, several dozen times faster than the word consumption of a typical human.”

If you thought that “How to“, the follow-up to “What if…” would be more practical, then you’d be wrong.

Whether it’s chasing a tornado without getting up from your couch or moving your house with jet engines, Munroe takes another fun, inventive journey through science and maths. While it doesn’t quite hang together as well as “What if,” it still manages to amuse, educate1 and entertain.

There are so many good bits that it’s difficult to mention even a few highlights, but I think possibly my favourite part is where he fails to faze Colonel Chris Hadfield, even when asked how to land a space shuttle that’s attached to the carrier aircraft (response: “Easy peasy”).

If you’re at all interested in science or engineering, you should read this book (if you haven’t already). Just — please — don’t take the advice literally.

  1. I mean, not directly. You’re unlikely to have an exam where you need to know how to build a lava moat. But the thought-process in getting a serious answer to an absurd question absolutely has value. ↩︎
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Come Again

I learned about this book on Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast (RHLSTP!). One of my favourite nineties comedy performers interviewing one of my favourite two-thousands comedy performers. I guess what I’m saying is that I’m not entirely impartial; I was predisposed to like “Come Again.”

Webb’s first book was a kind of a memoir. This is a novel. I’m pretty much the perfect demographic. The lead character went to an English university in the early nineties to study Computer Science. Even though it was a different university, so much was familiar.

Is it well written and researched or just lazy nostalgia?

I think that’s the question for the book as a whole. It’s a quick, unchallenging read. The writing is functional and it’s structured to included a few nice twists and the odd end-of-chapter cliff hanger.

The three sections are quite different in tone. The first and second work well but the third, while entertaining, doesn’t quite seem to fit.

So clearly I’m not going to describe this as “must read.” It’s a fun read and maybe that’s all it needs to be.