Management-Business – Page 20 – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

His Truth is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

By Scott J. Pearson | September 6, 2020September 24, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

The recently deceased congressman John Lewis has been a public light to the United States for over fifty years. Nicknamed “the conscience of Congress,” he courageously campaigned for civil rights since a college student in Nashville. The author Jon Meacham, surely one of America’s greatest biographers, writes this history of Lewis’ doings in the 1960s. With extreme acuity, gravity, and imagery, he captures what the civil rights movement resembled on the inside. In so doing,…

Management-Business Research-Education

Managing the Research University by Dean O. Smith

By Scott J. Pearson | July 23, 2020July 23, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

In traditional Oxford University Press fashion, this book communicates an “all you need to know” about being a Chief Research Officer at a research university. It attempts to catalogue the disparate parts of administering research. Much of the knowledge and wisdom in this field is broken up into different segments – like legal, administrative/management, marketing, and laboratory. This book attempts to bring all of this information into one place based off of sweat-earned experience. Research…

Cybersecurity Management-Business Software-Technology

Cybersecurity: Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review

By Scott J. Pearson | July 16, 2020November 23, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

As an IT professional, I do not reside in the intended audience of this book. It is geared towards business leaders, not software developers. It provides a high-level and non-technical overview of the field of cybersecurity. Through several authors, it makes the case that cybersecurity cannot be overlooked by all C-suite executives, even in non-technology-based companies. That case is underscored by the direct impact cybersecurity has on a business’ bottom line. Having in-depth technical experience…

Management-Business Writing-Communication

Blog for Bucks: How to Create, Promote, and Profit from Your Blog

By Scott J. Pearson | June 7, 2020June 7, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

The author Bodnar is a professional blogger and freelance writer. She maintains several blogs and operates in several roles – like a ghostwriter for blogs and for books, an author of books, and a maintainer of for-profit blogs. She distills wisdom from her experiences as she teaches how to blog. She covers everything from the basics of blogging to writing effective copy, from earning money from your blog to garnering a readership. She also includes…

Biography-Memoir History Leadership Society

Grant by Ron Chernow

By Scott J. Pearson | May 25, 2020September 24, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

This Memorial Day is appropriate to celebrate one of our nation’s forgotten saviors. Although Lincoln is often credited with guiding the nation’s rebirth by preserving the Union, none of this would have happened without Ulysses S. Grant’s leadership. Still, Grant is often denigrated as an inept drunk and a butcher of soldiers. This view simply was not shared among his contemporaries who viewed his grace in Confederate surrender at Appomattox Courthouse as foundational in national…

Management-Business Psychology

StrengthsFinder 2.0: Discover Your CliftonStrengths

By Scott J. Pearson | April 30, 2020May 1, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

I picked up this book because a group at work was discussing their strengths, and I wanted to take the survey to devote some thought to how I might work with them better. Don Clifton, a workplace psychologist, identified these 34 atomized strengths and developed a questionnaire to help individuals find their personal preferred strengths. Among the 34 are themes like Belief, Communication, Significance, Responsibility, Woo, and Context. First, some important financial advice. If you…

Management-Business

Crisis Management: Planning for the Inevitable

By Scott J. Pearson | April 16, 2020April 16, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

This book, almost 35 years old, still distills how to manage a crisis better than any other book known to me. It covers basics like damage control and crisis communication. More importantly, by providing plentiful examples from American government and business, it covers how to identify, isolate, and then manage crisis-level events that threaten one’s professional or personal life. In a prior life, Fink served as an advisor to a United States governor. That wide-open,…

Leadership Management-Business Presentation

Manager’s Guide to Crisis Management

By Scott J. Pearson | March 20, 2020September 24, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

In my opinion, this book is misnamed. Its proper main audience does not consist of managers but those in public relations; likewise, its main topic is not crisis management but communicating in a crisis. It admonishes the readers to plan for emergency situations, but it does very little to coach readers exactly how to do so. To be fair, it suggests that each company perform a “vulnerability analysis” to detect weaknesses that might be exploited…

Leadership Management-Business

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t

By Scott J. Pearson | March 18, 2020September 24, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

This work is the result of a cohort business study. The control group consisted of publicly owned companies that had good performance for 15 years and then great performance (defined as outperforming the market by over three times) for 15 years. There were only 11 good-to-great companies. Eleven other companies in similar lines of work were chosen into the comparison group. Then the research group dissected those companies to figure out what the great companies…

Management-Business Software-Technology

Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

By Scott J. Pearson | February 5, 2020February 5, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

This book helped change the way that software development is generally practiced, from the leadership to the programmers, from the business to the design. It is important to note that this book has been delivered in two very different editions. The first edition in 1999 set the direction while the second edition in 2005 brought insight out of several years of experience in an updated text. What’s so “extreme” about Extreme Programming? First, it advocates…