Customer Reviews

Leading IT: The Toughest Job in the World

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Leadership, says Bob Lewis, can be identified by the presence of followship. If nobody is following you, then no matter how inspiring or impressive you may think you are, you are not a leader. To lead is to persuade others to follow: That is the essence of leadership.

"Leading IT: The Toughest Job in the World" is what you get when you take the best book on leadership available; remove the repetition, padding, footnotes, appendices and inspirational fluff; but leave the intelligence in place. The result is 115 pages containing the essence of leadership, boiled down to the core.

Here is a typical example from a sidebar headed "Leadership is easiest in a crisis":

"...Leading an organization is much, much harder when there's no emergency. Consider Franklin Delano Roosevelt: His greatness resulted less from his resolve following the attack on Pearl Harbor than from his response to the Great Depression. By putting people back to work and through his weekly radio broadcasts he gave people hope. Arguably, it was by restoring America's belief in its ability to solve its problems that he could lead the country through World War II...."

How's that for a timely reminder?

Very well written and easy to read. Had great advise not only for those in a technical lead role but for those having to deal with technical people or situations needing discipline and rigor of process. Too often situations, HR type or interdisciplinary, leads to too many "touchie-feelie" responses with personalities dictating the responses. This will guide you beyond that.

Do not mistake brevity for lack of insight. This may be a slim volume, but you'll find more valuable, real-world advice here than in a host of weightier tomes, leavened as always with Bob's well-known dry humor. The clarity he brings to the essence of leadership is refreshing and valuable for all leaders, not just those focusing on IT. This isn't a how-to book; it's an expression of the eight basic principles that matter, placed into context with enough guidance and thought-provoking comments to let you apply them to your own situation. It should be standard issue to leaders at all levels of all organizations.

First, I must admit that I'm a Bob Lewis fan. I used to read his column in InfoWorld, and subscibe to his newsletter "Keep The Joint Running" (issurvivor.com).

Bob's insights are, in a word, spectacular. He challenges the things many never question, and provides refreshing ways to look at those assumptions. He does this with clarity AND an intellectual wit that is entertaining.

This book is made of 10 sections basically:

Introduction (What is Leadership Anyhow?)
Envisioning The Future
Delegation
Making Decisions
Staffing
Motivation
Building and Maintaining Teams
Culture
Communication
Final Thoughts

It's a thin book (115 pages) but don't expect to read it in a day. The information is densely packed, so you'll want to digest it slowly (or read it multiple times).

Reason is at the center of the points discussed. These aren't rules, but reviews of areas of operation - why something wouldn't work, why something would. You're not going to get a checklist that a great leader would follow. What you are going to get is a deeply thoughtful discussion of principles (understandings) that will get you thinking on a higher plane.

This is at the core of Bob's writing - thought. Incisive intellect produces such clarity as "Leaders delegate. The best leaders delegate goals rather than tasks or activities." or "The line that separates motivating employees from manipulating them is thin, and is determined entirely by your intentions." or "Hire people, not resumes." If you could grasp the entirety of these headliners, you'd be in fine shape; but, it really takes the review that Bob provides to get past the assumptions that block us from actually living these statements.

Managing smart people is not an easy task - they all have various opinions, whether or not those opinions are effective ideas (in each circumstance) depends on a lot of variables. This is where Bob eases the burden of "The Toughest Job" - at the very least he shows, by example, what it takes to review complex arenas and get to the core factors that may influence success for a particular set of circumstances. In short, reading his work will teach you how to think better.

What more could a writer do that is of any greater value?