First, the good: This book lives up to the cover’s hype. Its ten chapters take a deep look at the character of everyday leaders. What’s true in 1989 remains true in 2009, at the time of the text’s republishing, and it remains true in 2026, at the time of my writing. The word “classic” is not hyperbole. Warren Bennis provides a script and a set of principles to build everyday leaders. A clinical psychologist by…
Consulting is a business built around bettering the client’s business. Many work in large consulting firms to market their expertise, but in this book, Alan Weiss instead shows how to run a solo firm or a smaller firm to achieve the main good. The goal is to direct more money into one’s own pockets while maintaining more independence that can lead to better quality of life. This book teaches about running the business of a…
Sage advice is hard to come by – you know, the kind of advice that makes you change the way you look at the world and in turn act better in the world. We often look to experienced leaders and educators to point the way. James Ellis, the former Dean of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, served students for over two decades as professor and leader. Before that, he…
An oft-cited fact is that most small businesses don’t succeed. They fall prey to a common set of challenges – namely, that entrepreneurs never transition their work from a job into building a business. In this book, Michael Gerber shines light on this common error and shows ways to overcome it. He uses a parable of Sarah starting her own business as a way to interject life into these principles and illustrate how entrepreneurs can…
Months of formal voice training has been something that has attracted me for decades, but I could never justify the time or the expense for it. Obviously, anyone who leads groups and speaks to groups regularly needs to attend to the voice. It’s still difficult to get the feedback necessary to articulate words in an engaging manner. This book will not offer customized feedback, but to the self-disciplined, it offers ways to internalize principles of…
This short work introduces the reader to a career in IT consulting. Written by Eetu Niemi, a ten-year veteran of the field, it describes what IT consulting actually looks like and presents options about which kind of positions entrants should look for based on their personal values and life traits. Importantly, he distinguishes between management consulting and IT consulting. Management consulting can pay more but is much more demanding in terms of hours and expectations.…
Learning to think like the “next level up” is a challenge in any professional group. As the saying goes, what got you here isn’t going to get you there. The gap between management and leadership remains large. As you move up an organization’s chart, mentoring is harder to come by and free passes to make mistakes become fewer. Reading books like Bobby Lampkin’s provide opportunities to level up your thinking and behavior to bring further…
Metrics around software can be a difficult to attain. Some (Agile) suggest making up estimates and then making metrics based off of those estimates. Others (function points) build entire abstract schemes based on difficult-to-attain calculations. Either way, predicting and measuring progress are complex tasks, but they are necessary to communicate to management and to provide appropriate managerial oversight. In this book, the authors seek to provide practical methods to assure that projects are on track…
Steve McConnell is one of the best writers about software practices in our generation. Over decades, each of his books pushes the field forward, and each new book updates his thought with oodles of new data. This book, an evidence-based look at Agile, is no exception. Agile has become a catch-all term for a lot of software practices, but McConnell recenters his study about Agile on what’s most important in a business – getting results.…
Agile methods are just different than traditional approaches, kind of like Einsteinian physics is just different from Newtonian physics. They both have the same aims; they only have wildly different ways of getting there. Instead of estimating software schedules by reality-based values, agile creates abstractions like user stories, story points, and velocities to measure progress. Burndown charts project how quickly a feature set can be released. Maybe I’m an old fogey in the world of…