A concise distillation of more than five decades of leadership knowledge—good reading for all of the 2016 presidential...
The former secretary of defense offers insights into being an effective leader.
With an impressive record of service that also includes positions as director of the CIA, president of Texas A&M University, and, currently, chancellor of the College of William and Mary, Gates (Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of War, 2014, etc.) knows more than most about being a productive, respected leader. In this informative, entertaining, and useful book, he delves into what it takes to be a leader who can get results without creating unnecessary enemies. He enumerates certain aspects or criteria that are required for someone who wishes to be a trailblazer in the private or public sectors and then backs up these ideas with rich examples from his own work experiences. “The important thing to remember is that in any public or private sector organization, whether it has three million employees or three,” he writes, “having a clearly defined and achievable vision—or set of goals—and getting priorities right in moving forward are preconditions for successfully leading change.” It’s also important to maintain transparency regarding information, to consult with employees at all levels, and to establish methods of accountability. The author’s real-life examples are the strongest part of the book, as they show a side of bureaucracy and of upper-level leadership not often revealed to the public. These scenarios give readers a better understanding about how these organizations function. "The task of reforming institutions is a difficult one,” writes Gates. “A leader's heart must be on fire with belief in what she seeks to do. Changing institutions is a battle, and she must undertake it with courage, strength, and conviction." By following the author’s advice, most aspiring leaders will be able to do so.
A concise distillation of more than five decades of leadership knowledge—good reading for all of the 2016 presidential candidates.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-307-95949-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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