Does anyone have book suggestions on leadership and management which aren't just pop-business BS?
The hard thing about hard things, by Ben Horowitz
The Score Takes Care of Itself, Bill Walsh (49ers Coach)
Creativity, Inc, Ed Catmull (Ran Pixar)
To Pixar and Beyond, Lawrence Levy (CFO of Pixar with interesting different POV than Ed Catmull)
Otherwise for any dumpster fire of a subject I want a book on, I'll try to trace the "lineage" to see where the starting points were. The trash today won't be a thing 50 years from now. So, maybe look at books from 50 years ago or more.
Ben Horowitz's new book "What You Do Is Who You Are" is also well written and quite entertaining. There's a good mix of personal experience, humour and history.
I also liked both books by Ricardo Semler a lot (Maverick and Seven Days Weekend).
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert) also fits this description.
Does Scott Adams cover this in his book or did he largely work solo?
As far as I know, Adams worked solo, and failed to gain any traction in any large organization, so if that’s what you want to have advice about, the Dilbert guy might not be the one to advise you about how to enjoy success in large organizations.
He was a little weird for a long time, but his divorce in 2014 kind of unmoored him.
If you had a link to that weird tweet I would like to see it; it would be interesting to see if I agree with your characterization.
In the wake of a shooting (can't remember which) he tried to push his WhenHub product as a journalism tool.
And his fence-sitting support of Trump has always been "now I'm no Trump fan but here's a long list of things Trump is good at and I'll be very defensive about criticism".
I was a huge Dilbert fan, so watching his decline sucks.
https://mobile.twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/11556797972...
https://mobile.twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/75939845922...
Also the sockpuppet incident:
https://www.salon.com/2011/04/19/scott_adams_sock_puppetry_s...
There's also the Affirmations thing - the guy believes in his own brand of The Secret, where writing something down over and over again and wanting it bad enough will magic the universe into making it happen.
http://mindhacks.org/scott-adams-affirmations/135
The guy is kind of a mess. At this point he's his own worst enemy, PR wise.
> > It's not just the Trump thing. He loves to butt heads with the social justice types in a way that makes him look awful. Wrote some creepy antifemist blog-posts too.
> https://ew.com/article/2011/03/30/dilbert-scott-adams-femini...
That article, about a blog post of his, is a hit piece which takes the most inflammatory-sounding quote and displays it out of context. I think his explanatory post (https://www.scottadamssays.com/2011/03/27/im-a-what/), which includes the whole original blog post, explains everything quite clearly. Note that even the original blog post text includes a clarification that precisely the quoted inflammatory-sounding text does not mean what one might be tempted to believe if one were to read it out of context.
> > In the wake of a shooting (can't remember which) he tried to push his WhenHub product as a journalism tool.
> https://mobile.twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/11556797972...
It’s a free app, where people can declare that they have been witnesses to a newsworthy event, and journalists can use the app to find said witnesses and even talk to them using the app. What’s not to like? It’s like mentioning your gas-powered generators rental service during a widespread power outage. It might be slightly self-serving, but it’s useful information, and it’s not like he’s price gouging or taking any specific advantage of people’s misfortune. In fact, the very people who were impacted by the shooting can choose to earn money by setting an hourly price for journalists to interview them. Or they can set the price to zero if they just want to get the information out.
> > Like, Ive seen him in political flamewars on Twitter responding to criticism with pictures of his abs.
> https://mobile.twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/75939845922...
That tweet was a response to someone else’s tweet saying “this coming from the guy who thinks pop news nutrition is same thing as science.” – a picture displaying his health status was a perfectly relevant response (a mite adversarial, but this is Twitter) to something which, mind you, was an irrelevant off-topic ad-hominem personal attack. This is what you call “criticism”?
> Also the sockpuppet incident: https://www.salon.com/2011/04/19/scott_adams_sock_puppetry_s...
Yeah, OK, that one was weird.
> There's also the Affirmations thing - the guy believes in his own brand of The Secret, where writing something down over and over again and wanting it bad enough will magic the universe into making it happen.
> http://mindhacks.org/scott-adams-affirmations/135
What? No. Here’s a direct quote from that very link:
“At this point, allow me to correct a mistake I made the first time that I described my experience with affirmations. If you only hear the objective facts, it sounds as if I believe in some sort of voodoo or magic. That’s not the case. While I do think there is something wonderful and inexplicable about affirmations, I have no reason to conclude it is any more than a pleasant hallucination.”
Isn't that an odd thing to say, from a completely objective, dispassionate, and non-partisan perspective?
Perhaps it just seems obvious to me because I am familiar with the page on 538[1] where they track approval ratings in parallel with (I think) every other administration that was heavily polled.
Every other president has had their ups and downs, no matter how controversial or how partisan people were. But with this one, the percentages for and against seem practically set in stone at approximately the same ratio as the election. That seems to indicate he's convincing almost nobody who likes him or who dislikes him to change their minds.
[1]https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/
If the electors for states he won had been persuaded to vote for the popular vote winner, that's what would have taken convincing.
That’s not what I meant. It was really just an analogy. I meant that Trump aimed to win the actual election as performed by the electoral college, not the popular vote, since the popular vote does not determine the election. Trump convinced the states that mattered, not the electors. In the same way, Scott Adams would have it, Trump is skilled at convincing people who matter to the issue currently at hand, not the popular opinion of all people in general.
That never occurred to me. I simply assumed that everyone thought that Trump won the election by somehow being different from the other candidates. I mean, an election is a competition; One would normally assume that a winner had something personally to do with actually winning, you know?
But now that you mention it, it’s clear why it indeed is very controversial to assume this; the popular explanation (in many circles, at least) instead assumes an incompetent Trump and/or external electoral influence, and anything which detracts from this view (including alternative explanations) would therefore obviously be controversial.
I’ll try to not make this unwarranted assumption in the future. It was only an analogy, anyway, and since I have no stake in whether or not Trump has personal qualities, I hope I’ll be able to refrain from ascribing such where not warranted.
Also, good point about the correctness of Adams’ explanation somewhat hinging on itself being successful.
There is also a view that he won because of luck. Not that he won the lottery against incredible odds, but that he had about a 1/3 chance of winning enough electoral votes on the eve of the election, and also his polling followed a cyclical pattern that happened to have just peaked a few days before.
It's hard to say what governed that cyclical pattern, but if it was skill at convincing people, it seems like it wouldn't have been cyclical. It would have gone up and stayed there.
If some unlikely event happens, one could assume that it was just a random occurrence, and leave it at that. But that is an assumption one could always make, for any event; “random chance” can explain anything. If, instead, one sets random chance aside for a moment and looks for reasons beside random chance, one could find other possible reasons for the event, and possibly learn something new. Of course, there’s always the possibility that it actually was random chance, in which case one risks seeing spurious non-related events as being causal, and thereby learning the wrong thing. But I think it’s a risk one will have to take in order not to always go “a wizard did it”, never learning anything.
I'm not sure of the connection between wizards, the null hypothesis, and random chance never being a component of an explanation.
You make me think of this:
The null hypothesis is, likewise, an assumption that nothing has happened; in this case, it would mean that no events have happened to cause the observed unlikely event (which, to be clear, did happen); i.e. it must have happened by random chance.
Yes, to ascribe causation to random chance could be the result of the Holmesian fallacy. But, of course, not necessarily.
I don’t know what you’re unsure about.
I am sure that I am not the first person looking at the polarization of US politics and finding similarities to religion, and with religion it makes sense that the more conflict there is between religions, the more set in stone people's beliefs become. It is likely even a effective strategy for religious leaders in position of power to fuel that conflict in order to cement their followers' conviction even further.
We haven't been gradually moving towards this quasi-religious situation, as evidenced by past polling, which I linked to. It's just this administration.
So I think the evidence suggests that something about the current president is fundamentally different, maybe that he is for most people a symbol or placeholder and not a person.
Although, looking again at the polls from 2008-16, it might be that the current situation is something that happened gradually during that time period, and 2016 was not really a discontinuity.
Edit: Also, my point was it doesn't seem like he's changed people's minds. Being a religious leader may or may not mean you converted people.
It starts with SEALs in Afghanistan, because of course it does, and then the author loosely strings together a bunch of unconvincing anecdotes to support his core idea.
The worst part is his constant reference to various hormones and fight or flight responses in a superficial way that would make even TEDx feel ashamed.
Edit: there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the military can produce outstanding leaders. Humans have been battling for too long as not to have developed specialised training systems.
My gripe is with the book alone.
http://www.ceptm.iue.edu.ar/pdf/ADR002383-developingLeaders....
Obviously office work isn't the Army and you really shouldn't frame your work like a battle but generally. Everyone has a job, they are the one doing it so they are best to do it. Be professional, respectful and share a vision and you'll see people you lead follow you and mirror those traits. Your culture will start to reflect the environment you create.
It's interesting to compare the Taylor vs. Drucker view on management against the Bülow vs. Clausewitz view on war.
Ultimately I just couldn't finish the book because of the constant unrelated anecdotes.
Even more so for leadership within loose and/or voluntary organisations such as open source projects.
But it's definitely also pop.
When he finally gets to special causes vs. common causes, control charts etc. the book gets quite good.
Any business leadership book is likely to really be a management book.