Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

Trust & Inspire: How Truly Great Leaders Unleash Greatness in Others

By Scott J. Pearson | January 20, 2025January 20, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Today’s leadership, as practiced, often includes an approach borrowed from the Industrial Age and popularized by Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management.” It seeks to have a leader in complete “command and control” of all aspects of production. However, in the postmodern age, interdisciplinary knowledge workers often conduct every step along the way, and any leader does not and cannot know every step of the journey. Coupled with human nature, command and control tactics inhibit productivity…

Visual Explanations: Images & Quantities, Evidence & Narrative

By Scott J. Pearson | January 19, 2025January 19, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

“A picture is worth a thousand words,” so the saying goes. Thus, an effective visualization, enriched by information, must count for so much more. But a misconstrued visualization, unfortunately, can lead to horrific outcomes from misinterpretations. How can we refine our visual thinking so that we can infer correct deductions while ignoring misplaced sketches? Visualization guru Edward Tufte teaches us how to reason about our world through informative displays in this helpful guide, replete with…

Software-Technology

Software Architecture: The Hard Parts: Modern Trade-Off Analyses for Distributed Architectures

By Scott J. Pearson | January 13, 2025January 13, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

A software architect foresees potential issues in a design and judges which way will instill the most business success in the long run. Unfortunately, in almost every scenario, trade offs permeate every option. As the saying goes, the devil is in the details. Learning to anticipate problems with wisdom set great software architects apart from merely experienced ones. In this book, several experienced authors look at those trade offs in the context of distributed software…

Presentation Visualization

Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte

By Scott J. Pearson | January 12, 2025January 12, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

All the way back to Galileo sharing about Jupiter’s moons, science has relied upon visualizations to communicate its findings. Some things are just better depicted visually instead of through words. In contemporary society, information graphics have played an increasingly larger role as computers quickly translate data into a more accessible format. Newspapers and Internet websites have made them commonplace. Even though this book was written in 1990, before ubiquitous computing, it identifies the philosophical and…

Fiction-Stories

Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

By Scott J. Pearson | January 11, 2025January 11, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

In 1920s America, George Babbitt has it all. He lives in an up-and-coming, prosperous town. He has a family and two children. He has a successful job. He’s not a superman. No, he’s neither a CEO of a large corporation, nor a super-rich business tycoon, nor a famous celebrity. Nonetheless, he’s living a good life. But something suddenly happens to one of his close friends, and he calls his entire life into question. Today, we…

Management-Business

Interviewing & Selecting High Performers: Every Manager’s Guide to Effective Interviewing Techniques

By Scott J. Pearson | January 4, 2025January 4, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

This book was recommended to me as a solid work about the fundamentals of the hiring process. It delivered what was promised. It’s not a book focused on a recent management trend, but instead is a work built upon classical psychology – the art of reading people quickly and effectively. It attempts to minimize the amount of bias that interviewers inevitably put into an interview and maximize the observed items that interviewers extract from an…

Healthcare History Research-Education

Meharry Medical College

By Scott J. Pearson | January 1, 2025January 1, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Soon after Emancipation, large efforts were required to meet the needs of formerly enslaved people. A medical college was founded in Nashville as a department of Central Tennessee College to train black doctors to address the needs of the underserved blacks across the country. Now called Meharry Medical College almost 150 years later, the school continues to educate healthcare professionals and advance “the worship of God through service to man.” This book chronicles its history…

Biography-Memoir Politics

The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House

By Scott J. Pearson | December 31, 2024December 31, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

Social media has exposed what many women knew implicitly: Broad misogyny in American society is real… especially when a woman has a platform or power. Nancy Pelosi, the first woman Speaker of the US House of Representatives, has been a target for decades. Because she comes from a progressive district in San Francisco, she’s labeled as out of touch with most Americans. Her deep, religious faith rarely receives media airing. In this memoir, she demonstrates…

Presentation Visualization

Beautiful Evidence by Edward Tufte

By Scott J. Pearson | December 30, 2024December 30, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

Edward Tufte’s books on data visualization are nothing short of legend among us information geeks. A political scientist by training, he demonstrates how well-conceived visualizations can effectively communicate insights and how shortcomings can create catastrophes. He continues his famous series on visual imagination with this book on the intersection of data and art. He shows how displays of evidence can move readers much like art and how poorly constructed displays can inhibit good judgment. Tufte’s…