Recent Reading

I read two very interesting books this week:

The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John C. Maxwell, and Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom.

I’d had Tuesdays with Morrie sitting on my bookshelf for quite a while (we bought it at Costco, so that must have been at its peak of popularity), but hadn’t ever gotten around to opening it. But one of the people at the Shir Hadash Book Group was very vocal about recommending Albom’s next book, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, so I decided to read the one I had in hand.

And it was very definitely worth reading, especially as I’m trying to figure out what I should be doing at work to have a more significant impact, and as I’m trying to build a proposal to look at work practices and productivity. Sometimes, when looking at the way people work, it’s possible to forget that they are, first and foremost, people — not Human Resources or headcount; Tuesdays with Morrie is a good way to remember.

Unlike Tuesdays with Morrie, I had had no plans to read The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership; in fact, I’d never even heard of it or its author. But I had a request in to the Almaden Library for Rudy Giuliani’s Leadership, and when I asked the librarian about the status, she mentioned that she had Maxwell’s book in hand if I was interested in the meantime. So I borrowed it, and read it in one sitting.

There’s nothing profound in this book — in fact, all of the 21 Laws are obvious. Once you think of them, anyway. But seeing them in one place was good as a starting place for some thinking.

So that’s been my reading for the week — much more inspirational than anything in the papers lately, too.

Shabbat Shalom!