Book Reviews

Leadership Management-Business Program Management

Strategic Doing: Ten Skills for Agile Leadership

Organizational life in America has grown much flatter and more mobile in recent decades. A lifetime career with one company is now the exception rather than the norm. As such, an individual’s ability to contribute quickly to a team has become more important than their upward mobility. However, much literature about leadership and cultural practices remain fixed on the idea of one all-powerful person at the top commanding legions of followers. To counter this narrative,…

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Religion-Philosophy

The Prophetic Imagination: 40th Anniversary Edition

The Hebrew religion has an interesting role of a “prophet” (navi). Along with the Law and the Writings, it serves as one of the big three sections of the Hebrew Bible. Only a couple of other religions, usually Canaanite, have a similar personality type of ecstatic truth-tellers. Presbyterian theologian Walter Brueggemann, borrowing from Jewish rabbi Abraham Heschel, describes the essential prophetic feature as an imagination of an alternative reality. Prophets apply that imagination against a…

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Management-Business

The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future

A work colleague recently tipped me off to bullet journaling. Ok, truth be told, she tipped me off to it a year ago when it transformed her life. My work environment was pretty well organized at the time and remains so; thus, I passed on her tip. About one year later, she brought it up in another context, but this time I bit the bait because I have felt the need to get my personal…

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Biography-Memoir Leadership Science

Breaking Through: My Life in Science

First, who is Katalin Karikó? She is the primary scientist who showed how mRNA can be synthesized to create a vaccine. Why is that important? This technology enabled the COVID19 vaccines, which recently carried the world out of a pandemic. So Karikó’s impact and legacy are tremendous. What’s more is that she has a meaningful, inspiring life story that overcame the odds both in her native Hungary and in the halls of academe in America’s…

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Biography-Memoir Healthcare HIV/AIDS

My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story

Stories about HIV and AIDS fascinate me. They speak of our common humanity and our tragically all-too-common inhumanity towards each other. In fear, so many in power sought to sweep this disease and its victims under the rug, yet it pervaded to impact human life in almost every sphere. When AZT first showed promise and HAART later showed effectiveness, many breathed sighs of collective relief. Today, we live in an era of PEPFAR, where the…

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Biography-Memoir History Leadership

William McKinley

William McKinley is generally known to history as the US president before Teddy Roosevelt (TR). He was assassinated early in his second term, and as his vice president, TR assumed office. Most historians view TR as proper founder marking the beginning of the American century. In this book, Kevin Phillips says, not so fast. He contends that much of TR’s administrative foundation was laid by his predecessor and that had he lived, McKinley, not TR,…

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Leadership Management-Business Mentoring

Coaching for Performance: The Principles & Practice of Coaching & Leadership

The field of workplace management has moved, in recent decades, from just being about organizing people for financial profits to also incorporating social and even spiritual values into employees’ career development. Today, good employees demand not just a paycheck but a place where they can grow and develop in some way. How are managers to avoid being caught flat-footed to these changing circumstances? Most managers lead by how they’ve been managed in the past, and…

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Leadership Management-Business Software-Technology

Tech Leadership: The Blueprint for Evolving from Individual Contributor to Tech Leader

Typically, technical education prepares students for individual positions that require a lot of self-motivated thinking. They don’t usually prepare them for leading teams. Yet some new employees might find that they want to move beyond being an individual contributor (IC) into a leadership role. Getting an MBA would be an obvious educational direction, but that expensive route might not prepare a student for the exact kind of leadership role she/he desires. In this book, Andrew…

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Biography-Memoir

John Lewis: A Life by David Greenberg

Like many Americans, John Lewis’ casket coming across the Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 2020 evoked tears in me. He was one of the last great leaders of the 1960s civil rights movement to die. With the Black Lives Matter movement in the streets, the baton had been passed to a new generation. I grew up a white Republican in conservative South Carolina and did not knew who John Lewis was until much later…

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Biography-Memoir Politics

Madam Secretary: A Memoir by Madeleine Albright

Madeleine Albright served in Bill Clinton’s administration as UN Ambassador and Secretary of State – the first female ever in that role. Since Clinton was especially active in international diplomacy, she held a front-row seat and observed many international characters and diplomatic ventures. Further, her career broke the glass ceiling for women in government, and she did it while being a doting mother, grandmother, and even a divorcee. Finally, along with her birth family, she…

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