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Product Details
Series: Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life
Hardcover: 96 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press; F First Edition edition (April 25, 2011)
I bought this book because it was reviewed in the publication Nature. It is a short book, at only 80 pages, and is ghost written with Becky Bermont. Those should have been warnings. The author, John Maeda, conveys some of his wisdom through tweets he has sent. I think he may have been trying to capture the same feeling in this book by keeping it short. However, I found little insight into the skills of leadership. Maeda was appointed president of the Rhode Island School of Design and uses this to discuss areas he's had problems with and how he resolved it. However, some of the insights, like "you'll come across people you don't agree with and still have to listen to them" (my paraphrase) just aren't that interesting. Likewise, some books shouldn't be written, and I think this may be one of them.
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I truly hate to say this, but I was not inspired, enlightened, or impressed at all. Hearing Jon Maeda speak made me curious about this book, but unfortunately his ramblings were not particularly insightful. It opens with a note from his (co-writer?)Becky who acknowledges his unorthodox method of creating the book - he attempted to design the book before writing it - and quite frankly, it shows. The gold edging is the nicest part about it.
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It's hard to write a book on leadership because it's one of those fields -- unlike accounting or finance -- that you have to learn from trial and error in the world, not from a book or a class. That said, John Maeda (along with his co-author Becky Bermont) has a gift for distilling observations, for upending conventional wisdom, and for pitching an insight in an unexpected way. He does that here in his observations of leadership.
From the outset, you come across this table of contents:
Start Here Creative as Leader Technologist as Leader Professor as Leader Human as Leader Thank you Acknowledgments
The middle chapters give a sense of how Maeda navigates the different hats of a leader -- the artist, the technologist, the teacher, and the person. He seems to see leadership as a practice, and one governed by the same kinds of 'how to live' questions as being a person. He chooses to learn from his colleagues, like his provost, to connect with people over free food not just technological platforms (even though the latter is his expertise and therefore an easy go-to), and to observe and course-correct where the impression he gives is different from his intentions.
This book is particularly insightful on what it means to be a leader in an academic institution where people are rewarded for the highly individual accomplishment and where a host of incentives make it hard to motivate people to see themselves as in service to a larger whole.
I've always genuinely thought Maeda is one of the few people in the world who has mastered Twitter as an art form. The whole book is full of tweet-worthy, succinct insights. If you are a habitual underliner, as I am, you will find your book marked up quickly.Read more ›
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With Redesigning Leadership, John Maeda throws open the doors of his own Presidential Suite to give us a stark and honest rendition of the shakedown of his now extended, though once somewhat accidental, tour of duty as RISD's leader. This book is a valuable read for anyone wrestling with how to be accepted as a leader, either in their own heads or among those whom they propose to lead.
Maeda's hyper-multifaceted life -- he adroitly straddles the worlds of engineering and design, technology and art, Japan and the U.S., family and career -- has engendered for him a rather orthogonal perspective on much that he sees, which, while affording him a healthy measure of a non-insider's independence and objectivity, has nonetheless cast him as a bit of an eternal outsider. He draws strength from this, with admirable perseverance.
At its best, Maeda's leadership saga reminds us, among many other important lessons, that a life without struggle and challenge is boring and uninteresting and stagnant. Those of us who've "made it" to a relative pinnacle in our comfy lives -- Maeda was a tenured MIT professor before RISD -- would all do well to take a page from his book, take a calculated risk, redesign our lives, and jump headlong into our next Act.
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This is a nice contribution to the subject of leadership, which often glosses over the role of creativity and empathy (as informed and nurtured by art/design) in creating effective leaders. The book just scratches the surface on the subject, floating from idea to idea, but between the lines there's a lot of substance worth unpacking and exploring.
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This item: Redesigning Leadership (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life)
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