Leadership – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

Leading Through: Activating the Soul, Heart & Mind of Leadership

By Scott J. Pearson | September 26, 2024September 26, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

Throughout history, many leaders have approached their task with the desire to hold power over others. Ancient roman rulers epitomized this approach, and literature indicates that other great empires shared this mindset. However, history’s nuances also contain a subtler narrative of empowering others to fulfill their individual aspirations. Aristotle’s phrase of “human flourishing” comes to mind. This book’s authors harken to this humanistic tradition to describe their empowering view on leadership: “Leading through.” Leading through…

The Engineering Executive’s Primer: Impactful Technical Leadership

By Scott J. Pearson | September 24, 2024September 24, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

Encoding software is a highly technical task, but effective leadership is often anything but technical. Combining the two thus can be supremely difficult, but this pair of skills is necessary to fill roles like Chief Information Officer (CIO) or Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Unfortunately, advice is hard to come by in the literature since only a few extended books in this space. To better fill these gaps, Will Larson, known for his deep looks at…

Leadership Management-Business Program Management

Strategic Doing: Ten Skills for Agile Leadership

By Scott J. Pearson | September 10, 2024September 24, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

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,…

Biography-Memoir Leadership Science

Breaking Through: My Life in Science

By Scott J. Pearson | August 30, 2024September 24, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

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…

Biography-Memoir History Leadership

William McKinley

By Scott J. Pearson | August 23, 2024September 24, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

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,…

Leadership Management-Business Mentoring

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

By Scott J. Pearson | August 18, 2024September 24, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

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…

Leadership Management-Business Software-Technology

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

By Scott J. Pearson | August 13, 2024September 24, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

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…

Leadership Management-Business

Managing Creative People: Lessons in Leadership for the Ideas Economy

By Scott J. Pearson | June 9, 2024September 24, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

As Gordon Torr shares, creativity is a driving force of modern economies and of civilization. While productivity remains important, only innovation can give a company or a society a let up on the other. Unfortunately, few people are highly creative – a trait that requires both talent and nurturing. Managing talent in a way that leads to productive results is its own challenge with its own nuance. Torr shares some thoughts that can advance good…

Leadership Management-Business

Managing Conflict with Your Boss

By Scott J. Pearson | June 7, 2024September 24, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

This short, 30-page guide orients readers towards healthily managing conflict with someone in authority over you. Such conflicts can appear daunting, even overwhelming. The authors teach the basics of conflict management while balancing the precarious nature of being someone’s direct report. The teaching aims not to win the argument but to continue to go forward productively. Personally, I found it helpful that the book provided specific ways that conflict with a boss can arise. For…

Biography-Memoir Leadership Religion-Philosophy

Reading Through Rachel Held Evans’ Last Book Published in Her Lifetime

By Scott J. Pearson | June 3, 2024September 24, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

Setting: The 1925 Scopes Trial in East Tennessee Ninety-nine years ago in 1925, the famous Scopes trial occurred in Dayton, Tennessee, in the state’s eastern part, halfway between Chattanooga and Knoxville. The state legislature had recently made it illegal to teach human evolution in public schools. The rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s genetic mechanism for evolution had brought these concepts to the front of the American mind. At the ACLU’s encouragement, one teacher John Scopes deliberately…