Sheep, Tribes and Leadership: book reviews, March 09
March 13, 2009
Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom
Matthew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta
John Wiley & Sons, 2009, $42.95
Two stars
Tribes
Seth Godin
Piatkus, 2009, $22.99
One and a half stars
The Leadership Code
Dave Ulrich, Norm Smallwood, Kate Sweetman
Harvard Business Press, 2009
$29.95
One star
Business book publishing is a funny old game. It takes at least six months to write a decent book, and – goodness knows why it takes so long – usually six months or longer to get it from final draft to an actual product that can be shipped in boxes out to bookstores and publicised in magazines.
So the “new releases” table at your local Borders is actually an insightful snapshot into the mindscape of the publishing industry 12-18 months ago. Clearly publishers thought Web 2.0 or social networking was going to be hot.
Despite the onset of the most significant economic downturn in living memory, they may have been righter than they can imagine. If we’re entering a period of massive creative destruction, then perhaps the single most important foundation on which the new world will be built will be the social network, the ties that bind us all together across companies, industries, and geographies. Read more