I’ve never read any of the Dexter books. I’ve seen the show a couple times. There are tons of comparisons between the two, Dan Wells’ books and the Dexter books. I can watch Dexter or not. It doesn’t bug me. Never read one of the books. I Am Not A Serial Killer was a book I couldn’t put down. I wanted to call in sick to work to read it. It grabbed me and held me, tight, by the throat and I loved every minute of it!

There’s a bit towards the end where I found myself holding my breath, literally, not figuratively, holding my breath while I turned the pages as fast as my eyes could cram the words into my head.

It’s the story of a 15 year old sociopath who has no empathy. He doesn’t connect with people at all and he feels like an island, an observer of those around him. That in itself is something I think people can empathize with… everybody feels disconnected at times, like they’re watching life go on around them and they just aren’t “clicking” with what’s going on around them. Most of us haven’t taken animals apart to see what makes them tick though. As creepy as it sounds to read it… the protagonist, and the book is written from the point of view of the sociopath so you spend the whole book in his head, is likable. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to him. I want him to be OK.

A lof of times I find myself saying “He’s a good kid but…” about someone who maybe got in trouble with the law or with their parents. That’s hard to say here. He’s not kind of a troubled kid at all. He’s not troubled at all, and that’s the trouble. He referred to a person he got along with as “it” once and it shocked him. Not because they should have been a “she” or “he” (I’m trying to avoid spoilers here) but because he has studied serial killers and knows they refer to people as “it” to make the things they do to them easier. It’s easier to eviscerate an “it” than a “him” or a “her.” He’s not appalled by what he said so much as by what it means.

Really good book. Really disturbing. I can’t wait to read the next one.

‘All flying is easy. Just takes learning. Like everything else. Like everything else.’

When I started Hatchet I was immediately put in mind of Follow My Leader, another book along these lines. At their heart they’re coming of age stories. I read Follow My Leader in the summer of 1976 as part of a bicentennial summer reading program being put on by the town’s public library. Follow My Leader is the story of a boy who is blinded in an accident with a firecracker and how he learns to live with his new blindness. I walked around with my eyes closed for ages afterwards thinking I should learn to be blind just in case… That was a lot of years ago and I still remember how I felt about the kid in that book… that kid who was older than me at the time I read the book come to think of it. It’s a great book. I recommend it to any 8-14 year old boy… or older if you haven’t read it yet. (I’d say girl too, but I’ve no clue what girls that age read unless it’s Little House on the Prairie or My Darling My Hamburger having never been a girl.)

Hatchet is a book I wish I’d read around the same time as the Follow My Leader. It’s the story of a kid who’s little two person plane goes down in the Canadian bush while he’s on the way to see his dad. The pilot died of a heart attack was the problem initially. The only tool he had to survive with was a hatchet his Mom had given him before he left, and his brains. He learns to use his brains and survive until help came.

“I am full of tough hope.”

It’s not a long book, but the distance the boy goes from suicidal to survivor, and not just survivor, but more than he was when he got there is huge. I had a hatchet when I was a boy, and a river we used to camp at that felt about as remote as the Canadian Bush. If I’d read this before going it would have added a whole level to the camping trips as I would almost certainly have pretended to be crashed out there on that river.

One of the things about this book and about Ender’s Game is that it portrays kids as capable and intelligent. When I was the age Brian (that’s the protagonist’s name) was in the book I thought I was pretty smart. I think all kids do at all ages… I still do… some things we never grow out of I guess. I felt I was capable of more than I was allowed, and that’s probably a good thing. The sense that he could not die out there in the bush, that he was capable of dealing with what had happened, and not just survive, but thrive in a way. That’s a big part of both this book and Follow my Leader actually… it’s more than survival or dealing with the hand you’re dealt. It’s about coming out the otherside bigger than you were before. The word “survivor” has an intimation to it…

Survivor: To remain alive or in existence.

That’s not what either of these kids do in either book, or in Ender’s Game for that matter. They’re put in a situation, a bad situation and they don’t just survive. That’s the bare minimum people do every other day to make it to the end of the day. They came out the other side stronger than they were before, tempered like steel by being run through the crucible or forge of a bad experience. They don’t just come out the other side the same they went in but glad to have lived through it… that’s surviving, they came out better than they went in. They came out changed. They overcame. That to me is why Hatchet is such a great book. For a kid to read stories about survival is fine, but for them to read books where mere survival is not enough… where the protagonist can go through something awful and come out better than before, that shapes the reader’s mind in such a way that when they’re, we’re, I’m put in a a situation that looks insurmountable or terrible or overwhelming there’s already an expectation in my head that I don’t have to merely survive, but I can, with some hard work, luck, and tough hope, come out the other side better. It’s not enough to grip with your fingernails and hold on to the edge of a cliff for dear life waiting for help, hoping to get out the other side merely alive… but to pull yourself up  and stand on the precipice and look around you to see what you can do for yourself. That lesson, the lesson that we can be independently successful even in untenable surroundings, that lesson is one every kid should learn.

I’ve been incredibly lucky in my life in that I haven’t ever been struck blind by a fire-cracker. I’ve never crashed in a plane in the middle of the Canadian bush and been attacked by an insane moose. I’ve never been sent to Battle School away from my family to fight the buggers for the existence of the human race. None of that stuff’s happened to me and honestly, I’m OK with that… but the things that have happened to me, that have come along that weren’t all sunshine and roses… those things have helped make me who I am, which is more than a survivor, more than someone who merely “got through them.” I wouldn’t be who I am today if I hadn’t gone through those things, and even though they aren’t particularly pleasant to go through at the time, I don’t think Brian would say his stay at the lake in Canada with the bears and wolves and mosquitos was a vacation… I also don’t think I would want to change any of them. If I did I wouldn’t be me, and I like who I’ve become.

Any kid out there could stand to learn the lesson that adversity doesn’t have to be just lived through, but can be used as the fire that tempers the soul, turning it from the fragile, brittle thing it can be in our insecurities to a tougher thing, a stronger thing that can not just stand pressure, but spring back, pushing back the darkness, pushing back the tide, holding a light up saying, as Brian did in the book:

Come on, he thought, baring his teeth in the darkness—come on. Is that the best you can do—is that all you can hit me with—a moose and a tornado? Well, he thought, holding his ribs and smiling, then spitting mosquitoes out of his mouth. Well, that won’t get the job done. That was the difference now. He had changed, and he was tough.

Anyway. I donated the book without reading it. I’m glad I didn’t put my name on it. There. I said it.

Here’s the thing. With Little Brother I knew what the problem was. I knew there had to be some resolution. I had some characters I cared about to focus on and I knew the desired outcome and what I didn’t want to happen to them. I was engaged in them and in their story. In For the Win there are a lot of characters. I haven’t really cared about them much at all. I can’t remember the name of the one I cared most about so that’s no good. And the problem? The problem is life isn’t fair. That’s the problem in the story as I saw it. How is that going to be fixed? It’s not. Life ISN’T fair. I’m three-quarters of the way through the book and I shouldn’t do the review until I finish the book. It’s unfair of me to review it before I’m done with it. The thing is. I’m done with it.

I can close the book right now without knowing what happens to any of the characters in the story and I won’t wonder about it later. The book is about the economies in online games. I LOVE online games. I won’t lie. I even bought gold once in Everquest (EQ). I played Everquest 1 & 2, World of Warcraft, Asheron’s Call, Star Wars Galaxies, and another one… I can’t remember the name. I didn’t play long. I played a lot of them. EQ for years! I was guild leader of a decent guild that’s still around I believe, years and years later. I invested five years in that game. Loved it. I got the economy. I understand it and how it worked. Cory didn’t want to step on any IP toes (Intellectual Properties) when he was writing the book so the games are weirdly named, Mushroom Kingdoms and things like that… that’s fine… I get it. Don’t want to incriminate an existing game and get them breathing down your neck.

Except he put them as products made by Coca Cola. Really? You dodge one bullet by making up weird game names, but then you invoke one of the most iconic names in the world as the parent company? It made the made up game names more distracting. Had he simply named them Megacorp it would have been less distracting to me. It really jerked me out of the book, the made up names interlaced with real parent company names served as a distraction, a focal point that shattered my immersion into the book-reality.

Last thing, and this is something I wouldn’t notice in a hard cover book. Cory did this in Little Brother and I read it in dead tree format and listened to it in Audiobook and I didn’t notice it. Each chapter starts with a dedication to a book store. That’s cool. In a novel I can skip that part. In the digital version, reading it on the kindle it was harder to skip, scanning was an issue so I wound up reading more of it than I wanted to. That’s a limitation of the kindle more than of the book. Here’s the thing though. I don’t care. I know that makes me a jerk, but reading about why a particular book store is special to someone is like listening to a guy on the bus explain to you why Freebird is the ultimate in anthems and it really means a lot to him “because of the really wicked shit I was going through when I heard that song for the first time you know what I mean man?” I do know what you mean man… and I still don’t like Freebird! My favorite southern rock song is The Three Great Alabama Icons by Drive By Truckers. (I grew up from ’68-’81 in Southern Alabama around the time the writer’s of this song were in Northern Alabama.)

I love book stores. There’s an excellent used book store in Southaven, Mississippi that I miss deeply, but unless you’re IN Southaven you don’t care about it is my guess. And if you are, and you’re a reader… you probably already know about it. They did a pretty brisk business.

Would I recommend this book? No. I wouldn’t, and I’m sorry about that too. I love Cory Doctorow’s blog and many of his other books. Seriously, Little Brother is in my top 5 and that’s saying something! But this one… it just missed on too many things. I didn’t care about the characters, the gaming part didn’t ring true, 3/4 of the way through I didn’t know what I was supposed to be reading/caring about. I didn’t know where he was going. I didn’t know where the characters were going, and I just didn’t care. And on a stylistic note… what the hell was with the chin waggling? Dear Lord!?!? Everybody was waggling their chin all the time. It was so distracting every time it would happen I’d look up and look around. I’ve STILL not seen anybody waggle their chin except for one guy, in India I think while watching Eat, Pray, Love. I’m not sure he didn’t have something in his teeth.

If you read the book and finish it and the ending of the book is worth it… can you shoot me an e-mail? I’ll finish it and edit this to reflect my mistake in stopping too soon as well as issue an apology for reviewing a book I didn’t finish.

The Levity Effect: Why it Pays to Lighten Up

I’m reading The Levity Effect: Why it Pays to Lighten Up and listening to Brain Rules from audible at the same time and they’re surprisingly related. I’ll cover Brain Rules later. For now The Levity Effect is being reviewed. It was good. I enjoyed it. It’s a book that will be enjoyed, I believe, by people who already believe what it’s saying. I don’t know that the people who don’t believe it will be persuaded by the book. It’s not that there isn’t enough evidence suggested in the book. It’s just that it’s not terribly persuasive. As such I think it will mostly preach to the converted. I can’t, for example, see my boss reading it and embracing it. That’s now how he does things stylistically. That’s not fair. He does try.

One of the things the book does work hard to point out is the difference between fun and funny and it’s a good distinction. It can be fun at work without someone having to be funny. Fun is not the same as funny. It’s been said at my work that if one enjoys their work then their work will be fun, not fun like volleyball fun, but fun as in “I enjoy what I do and feel fulfilled doing it” fun. I totally see that and agree with it, but that doesn’t mean a little silliness doesn’t have its place at work. According to a lot of the research presented in The Levity Effect the bottom line is always better if people are enjoying themselves at work. Morale is up, people are more productive, and turn-over goes down… how is this not persuasive? I don’t know.

My favorite part of the book is where they discuss how important fun is as a measure of the strength of a relationship. Trust, Communication, and Creativity are all increased by the precepts put forward by The Levity Effect. That part was a surprise to me, but the truth of it came to me as I read it. The people I was most comfortable with and most trusted were the people I was most able to joke around with. I’d never put that together before. I use humor to establish relationships and maintain them.

The list of things to do that help introduce levity also look as if they would be good for team building and morale building. They don’t expressly say that, but people who have fun together I think will perform better together. If you’re a person who believes that work is something that we do an awful lot of and so it should be fun because we’re doing it a lot you should read this book. If your boss tries it then leave this book laying around where the boss will see it. Maybe he’ll give it a read. If your boss is a reader let them read it. It’s a good book. I don’t know how persuasive it is, again, it persuaded be because I already bought into it.

If you’re a manager and you want to be a more effective manager this book will help. Please though, don’t forget you have an HR department. Read the back portion of the book. Remember that mean isn’t funny, and the authors are spot on when they warn that if you’ve got to start a joke with “I hope nobody’s offended but…” or end with “just kidding” then you probably shouldn’t say it. Those things are typically not a good idea. This book is a good idea, after the recession we’ve been in lately and the grim news about it and the cost cuts and lay-offs many companies have been through I’d say it’s a book whose time has come.

“I will believe it a good comfortable road untill I am compelled to beleive differently”
~Meriwether Lewis’ Journal via
Into the Unknown: Leadership Lessons from Lewis & Clark’s Daring Westward Expedition.

Into the Unknown by Jack Uldrich talks briefly about Lewis & Clark’s expedition, but the focus is what leaders can learn about Lewis & Clark themselves both from their writings in their copious journals and notes and from their actions. I can say they were interesting men and the book has piqued my interest in them to the point where I will probably read a more bibliographical book to get a more complete story about them. It was published in 2004 and I’m surprised I didn’t hear of it sooner. I discovered it while looking for kindle books. I’m glad I did.

I started with a quote from Meriwether Lewis’ journal. After cresting the first of a range of mountains, and expecting to find a river leading down into a land of milk and honey he saw mountains as far as the eye could see, and no easy going. His response wasn’t to give up, wail or despair… it was to marvel at the beauty before him and to expect the road ahead to be an easy one until it proved otherwise. This optimism of Lewis & Clark’s is credited with being a primary reason they succeeded.

But as optimistic as they were, and they were, in the face of overwhelming odds, they planned extraordinarily and didn’t count on wishful thinking or the power of positive thinking to solve their problems for them. They packed a 200olb steel shell to make a boat with in anticipation of needing it. (It didn’t work out and they abandoned it… discarding ideas that didn’t work when it became apparent they wouldn’t work. New Coke anyone?)

My biggest takeaway from Into the Unknown: Leadership Lessons from Lewis & Clark’s Daring Westward Expedition was to plan exceptionally, proceed confidently, and believe unflinchingly in your success. I suspect this was my takeaway because this is how I strive to comport myself in my daily life. I confess to slipping at it at times. Sometimes my optimism bulb dims a bit. Sometimes I tend to see the shadows rather than the light, and sometimes, when I’m tired, I forget that I’m not alone and that I’ve got the help of friends, co-workers, and a support system out there willing to help if all I do is ask and trust them to help me.

The book itself has lots of lessons from the expedition which is exactly what it advertises itself as. What it doesn’t have is concrete, memorable examples of how to directly apply the lessons to real life. OK. That’s not fair what I did there. I added the word “memorable” because I can’t remember any of the examples they gave. I know they gave some. But what they mostly did was talk about the character of the men who were Lewis & Clark and how that relates to leadership on the whole.

Remembering I don’t know much about the men I’d like to stress that this book was written by a person who liked and respected the men. It’s possible they did things that others would like to talk about badly, he didn’t free his slave right away when he returned from the expedition for example, but I’m not interested in hearing about or studying famous men’s faults. I’ll assume they had some. I’ll assume that the men in the party had some. The part where they kept coming down with VD tells me they weren’t saints. I get that. Please… nobody take an opportunity in the comments to post some sort of Lewis & Clark expose of how they were Expansionist White Men who were only great by trampling minorities and blah blah blah. That’s a different book. The one I reviewed made mention of some of this stuff, but it wasn’t the focus and wasn’t intended to be.

Starship: Mutiny introduced us to a military man who was too smart for his own good… too smart for the military. He kept getting in trouble and demoted twice for doing great heroic things that showed off his genius while rubbing his chain of command in how much smarter he was than them. I could totally identify with that. After all, I’m a genius right? Just ask me. I’ll tell you. And, as in the book… I will go on to explain over and over again why my reasoning is right, why my compatriots should trust me, why everybody else is stupid, and why, in painstaking detail both before, during, and after, my plan will succeed. Wait. No, that’s not me. That’s the protagonist of Starship: Mutiny, Wilson Cole. By the end of the first book I was really tired of hearing him explain himself over and over again. I get it… you’re smarter than everybody else. So was Lazarus Long and everybody on the Gay Deceiver (Deety, Zebediah, Jacob & Hilda) but Heinlein didn’t constantly beat me up with it. He let them ACT intelligently without constantly blowing their own horn.

Wilson Cole came across not intelligent and witty and urbane. He came across over-bearing and arrogant. That was the first book, which I mostly enjoyed. I don’t mind arrogant that much if there are other redeeming qualities. By the time I got to the second book, Starship: Pirate I was tired of the arrogance and tired of how Resnick used the supporting characters as foils for Wilson Cole. I felt like he, Resnick, could have allowed the other characters to have a brain too. Every time a decision had to be made in book two there was an argument where the supporting characters fought with Wilson Cole only to have him bulldoze them into accepting his way of doing it and in every case he was right. Seriously… if they’re that stupid why would he be friends with them?

The head of security, Sharon Blacksmith, isn’t just a strong woman who is head of a hugely strong security department and who is incredibly competent at her job and amazingly smart at her job is, for some reason whenever she gets around Wilson Cole, a giddy slut who can only talk about the previous night’s sex and their future sex that they may or may not have depending on if they’re getting along at the moment. She does this all the time, in person, by hologram, in front of other members of the crew, just whenever Resnick needs to try and break tension. Instead of coming across flirty or flirtatious it comes across trashy and wrecks her character for me.

By the end of the second book in the series (Starship: Pirate) I was done with Wilson Cole and his supporting crew. I liked the story and really wish I didn’t hate the characters so much. I won’t read books 3, 4, or 5. This is saying a lot since I already bought book 3 on audible.com. I’d rather listen to nothing than subject myself to more of Wilson Cole bullying his “friends” and telling us how smart he is and how blind and unobservant his crew is.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Dirty Little Angels by Chris Tusa was a good read. I’m from the South, and worked in New Orleans for a short while before Katrina. The book excellently captures the feel and tone of the area. If you’ve been there, and I mean there as in not just in the Quarter you’ll know that might not be the best tone to capture. The poverty, crime, and feeling of helplessness and inability to escape from the dead-end that surrounds New Orleans is excellently captured. The characters lives and their emotions came across really well. Unfortunately I didn’t find their lives something I could identify with… thankfully, and the primary emotion was despair, bleak mind-numbing despair.

European movies have to me always felt like they were different from US movies in that they seemed to be snippets of life without huge climaxes and then a nice tidy resolution scene where all the ends are tied up like most American movies. Dirty Little Angels is the same way. The book is like turning on the TV and coming in part way through a movie about someone’s life and watching a few hours and then turning it off without knowing how the players got there or what happened later. There’s no neat little resolution here. Life isn’t neatly wound up with little bows either.

They say the sign of a good book is that when you’re done reading it you want to read more. I usually agree with that. Here I didn’t want to read more because I was sympathetic to the characters, but I wanted to read more because I wanted to know that things turned out OK for them in spite of all the other crap going on in their lives. I hope they’re OK. They were in the shadow of a city that swallows people alive when I found them, and they still were when I left them. I recommend the book if you enjoy Southern fiction or books with/about New Orleans.

I received a free copy of this book digitally in exchange for reviewing it. I got a review copy and I agreed to review it. I didn’t get paid and I didn’t rate it higher or lower because of being given a review copy. I thought it only fair that I mention that. And yes. I read it on my kindle and I still love my kindle. I’m off to read it again now!

Would I recommend it? Not the paperback. It’s just too expensive. The 99c version of it on kindle was good. It was worth a buck. I’d pay anything up to five dollars for it as it’s a fun story that the cover does not sell at all. In fact, the more I read of the book the less I liked the cover. While you can’t tell a book by the cover I like to think you can tell what type of book it will be by the cover. Uncubicled was an action/adventure book with an office intrigue cover. If M. Night Shamalamadingdong were on crack and had a cattle prod massaging his spine THIS is the book he would write. OK. It’s not that full of twists… but there are a few more than it absolutely needed.

It’s a good first book. I really did enjoy it. I liked the characters, without giving anything away, in spite of the deus ex machina twist that got so predictable that I fully expected a can-opener to develop the trait that was over-used towards the end.

I read this book really wanting to love it. I’m a new author. I’m a fan of twitter, and was dying to “discover” a new author who was great and about to make it big in a huge way. This won’t be the book that does it as it stands now in my opinion. Will I read the next book he writes? Absolutely. I enjoyed it and I like supporting new authors. It’s a good novice effort. If I owned it in dead-tree version I’d loan it to friends if they promised to give it back. I own it digitally so I can’t loan it which is my biggest gripe with digital formatted books. They’re unloanable.  This is a problem for new authors because I can’t loan the book to a friend so they can discover him and buy his second book. They can’t enjoy the thrill of discovering a new author without paying $20 for it. That’s a lot to pay for this book. Too much. THIS is the downside of digital.

Full Disclosure: I didn’t pay for the copy I’m reviewing here. I was sent an advance copy to review. I don’t believe that impacted my review at all, but thought it would only be honest to mention it to those of you who read me. OK. Disclosure over, on with the review.

As I read the book I had a lot of time in MANY of the chapters when I was thinking to myself, “This is exactly what THAT boss of mine did wrong!” As the evidence started piling up I started worrying that if my employees were to read the book they’d say the exact same thing. I know I’ve found Dilbert comics on their peg-boards that I thought were funny… even after I realized they had to mean I was the pointy-haired boss. I will be getting a copy for managers of mine that I think would read it and take it to heart. I don’t think all of them would… they’re not all the avid reader that I am.

The start of How Did That Happen?, where it talks about the title is a real eye-opener and a game changer for the way people think. If I had to sum up the impact of the book in one line it would be way towards the front of the book where it suggests instead of looking at a problem or break-down of some sort and saying “How did that happen” we should ask “How did I let that happen?” Those two words are so powerful. It addresses where I so often see a breakdown in communication. That sort of personal accountability is, I believe, the hallmark of a good manager. If I find someone who does that automatically instead of blaming their employees, the weather, or the economy I’m thrilled and work hard to get out of their way and help them to be great.

One of the breakdowns that hit home the closest was when a manager will give vague expectations, unclear boundaries of responsibility and authority, and accountability and then be surprised later when expectations aren’t met. Vague goals of “Make more money.” Would certainly fall into that category. Sure… it’s an easy one. But should we make more money or make more profit? I can make more money by marking things down steeply, but that will decrease our profit. I can make more money in the short term by cutting back on merchandise in a store so I’m not spending any more. Without giving clear, concise, and measurable outlines of my expectations my employees will find it hard to not disappoint me. I will be setting them up to fail over and over again by my own carelessness.

I’m one who typically scoffs at acronyms, as annoying mnemonics along the lines of Every Good Boy Does Fine for the piano. But Framing an expectation using the acronym given in How Did That Happen looks about fool proof, even for ingenious fools.

Expectations should be Framable, Obtainable, Repeatable, and Measurable.

Framable as in the expectations fit within the framework, context, business environment and culture of the business.
Obtainable, this one’s obvious and one I’ve been good at following. I once told a new supervisor they should ask for things a little sooner, faster, better than the employees volunteered to do as he was the leader, and should pull them forward, not let them wander wherever they wanted at their own pace, but I cautioned against giving impossible goals that nobody could finish in that time as it set them up to fail. He wanted to help them to exceed their expectations, not to teach them to expect to fail.
Repeatable was the one I had the most trouble “getting” as I read the book. It finally clicked when I quit thinking as in “do it over again” and thought of it as “communicated over again to other people who are working on the project. If the goal or expectation is so numinous and vague that only someone with a degree in macro-economics can get what is being talked about it’s going to be hard to get everybody on board with working towards that goal. Making sure that the goal is something that can be conveyed to everybody involved easily, and in a way they understand is important. It will be hard for them to get invested in a goal they don’t “get.” “We need to increase mom and pop profit store to store year over year by 5 percent” is not meaningful to a lot of front-liners who haven’t a clue what that means but they KNOW that they don’t work for their parents.
Measurable was and is my favorite part as my biggest “Ah Ha!” moment for me. Having a measurable goal makes it so much easier to know where on the progress bar we are towards achieving the expectations. Having delegated parts of a job that is measurable into other measurable parts it makes it easier for me as a manager to find where my bottle neck is and address that with further training, or reassessment of  how even I was at delegating the jobs.

I hate to sound like this was a new concept to me, it wasn’t. But in this context it was put in a way that something inside clicked that I just liked. I’m not a complete convert to acronyms yet, but I don’t hate this one.

Overall, How Did That Happen? is about accountability, it’s right in the sub-title, and it talks about accountability in way that makes sense and is applicable with real world examples. This brings up one of my stylistic complaints about the book. At the outset of How Did That Happen? the authors point out that they’re going to change the names of people and businesses to protect their identities and they’re going to put their names in quotes whenever the name is changed. Here’s the thing… those quotes get really repetitious and distracting really fast. I get it. In examples about the real world people names and company names are changed. Honestly, you’d be crazy not to for liability reasons. I think most readers assume that’s going to happen. Attributions, quotes, advice and suggestions coming from someone, those are attributed to real people. We understand that. It’s the reason I use names like “Mongo” and “Roy” in my blog. I have no employees by either name. They’re safe names to use, as are “Mega-corp,” and referencing products as “widgets.” We don’t need to put quotes around everything that is changed. Seriously, I got it, and by the end of the book I was seeing sly wink and air-quotes every time I came across it. It really took me out of the book. This is totally a stylistic quibble. The content was really good. I just wish they’d dispensed with the quotes around altered names.

There’s a diagram three-quarters of the way through the book that talks about people who are above the line and below the line with personal accountability. The above the line employee will see a problem, own it, solve it, and do it. That’s obviously the desired approach. The below the line people are depicted with someone with a lot of other options going through their head as they encounter a problem, choices like: Wait and See, not my job, cover your butt, and finger pointing to name a few.

This huge difference in above and below the line employees was highlighted for me personally when I went to work one day recently and found a note in my fax machine from Mongo, a relatively new employee who used to work for a competitor with a very different culture: “Rich, A customer bought a widget and when he came back later he said the box had been empty. I tried to call Manager and Assistant Manager but neither of them answered their phones so I told him I couldn’t help him. He got hostile so I called the police and had him removed.”

I was floored. The police had been called to remove a customer who was upset because we’d done something wrong and Mongo really thought this was a good answer. The cost of the widget in question was around 8 dollars. Obviously there’s room for improvement in this one. I still don’t know what I’m going to do in this situation to fix it. I don’t know if it CAN be fixed. I haven’t got the customer’s name and don’t know how to reach them but I really really want to. There isn’t enough time today for me to apologize for what went wrong there if I can ever find that customer again. But as soon as I read the note in my fax machine the graphic for below the line accountability came to mind. (As an aside the manager was on vacation and the assistant manager called minutes later after leaving doctor’s office, but it was too late it’d already happened. It was the perfect storm of bad timing.)

The take-home from How Did That Happen? is that accountability isn’t a bad word. It’s not the stick part of carrot and stick. Accountability is akin to ownership. I won’t equate it with ownership, because it’s bigger than that. It’s an empowering tool as much as it is a tool that makes us responsible. Accountability as it came across in How Did That Happen? was the perfect marriage of responsibility, authority and drive. I know — that’s a three way marriage, but just go with it would you? Please?

Some management/business books are thin, have fun drawings in them, clever titles, and have the feeling of a fad diet to them. This book is not that kind of reading. It’s not diet, it’s a lifestyle change. I say that in a good way. Those purple cows out there moving fred’s cheese factor are all great books I’m sure, but they all left me feeling a little hollow. Something like Angel Food cake. Yeah, I know I ate something, but it’s later and I can’t remember what it was I ate and I’m hungry again. How Did That Happen? isn’t a beach book and it’s not a read in a day and walk away book.

There was a point in How Did That Happen? where they said feedback was a habit that people quickly fell out of or started with good intentions but didn’t keep up with and I smiled to myself and thought immediately of Rosa Say’s Daily Five. Anybody who is a practitioner of that will take to the feedback discussions in here like a duck to water and will also smile at the idea that they wouldn’t give feedback.

I was pleasantly surprised by How Did That Happen? by Roger Connors and Tom Smith. I’d never heard of them or their other books before now and I find I’m going to have to go back and read The Oz Principle and the only real decision there is whether I’ll read it in kindle or paper edition. If the marking I did in this one is any indication I should get the paper edition. It might be a good time to learn to mark-up a kindle edition of a book though. (I just checked and The Oz Principle is available on the kindle. I’m going to get it that way.)

Rich,

Congratulations on closing your “Kindle” goal to
Amazon.com!  Your gift card codes are as follows:

Yep, that’s right. A personalized letter congratulating me on my success at savings along with the benefits of my savings. I immediately felt good about the whole savings thing. I enjoy saving money. But this money wasn’t saved to sit around in a bank for them to screw it up. I t was saved for an amazon kindle 2.

Next I got this e-mail from amazon.com

The following items have been shipped to you by Amazon.com:
1  Kindle: Amazon’s 6″ Wirele…

After ordering it I sat at home and waited to regret spending that much money on what is essentially a luxury item. I don’t do that a lot really. I didn’t though. Instead I had visions of my reading all the classics. Me sitting in a recliner sipping hot tea listening to light music. Me tearing through all those books I need to read that I’ve got added to my to-read list over on goodreads. I was pretty sure that the kindle 2 was going to solve all my problems.

No pressure at all on this chunk of plastic and circuitry that is currently whizzing it’s way towards me in a brown truck. All it needs to do is give me more time in the day so I can get some reading done just like my Google profile says I need! It will help me manage my time better, Google Calendar is helping with that when I sync it with my blackberry too. But this kindle… coming Monday I think? THAT will be the panacea that cures everything for me.

So… the summer of gadgetry is off to a good start. I’ve got another smartypig savings goal coming up in the beginning of September when I go buy myself a new laptop, a PC. I’ll let you know what I decide on. I’m sort of doing the PC challenge that Microsoft ads have been talking about on TV lately.