Reading list: Becoming a Technical Leader

I used to have a blog, then discontinued. Here, I am reposting some of the old content, the one I still like or and that I feel still somewhat relevant. In this case, it’s an old draft that wrote in 2010, but then I never published…

Becoming a technical leader: an organic problem-solving approach is a kind of classic book. I have started reading it lately, when I first saw it in our campus library.

After reading it, I can say that there are few things in this book that I don’t like:

• I don’t like the contrast between “linear” and “organic” models, always, always identifiable as, respectively, “wrong” and “right”.
• Moreover, each time the author tries to explain some particular behavior, it will resort in the end to the “threat-reward” model, applied to little children.
• Also, I don’t like the “guru” approach: the author breaks barriers speaking in first person of his problems and feelings, but then he is always on the right side, and he is always the enlightening one in all of his examples - and in all his relationship with the reader.

Nevertheless, I love the book. Because it is enlightening.
It is a wonderful piece of knowledge. It was able to show me the relationship with my work and my colleagues in a completely different way, and for each chapter I read, I was thinking “I have to read it again”.

Note also, I really think the title is wrong, and it should remove the word “technical”: this is a book on leadership and specifically on leaders because of their knowledge and competency in the field and not simply because they have been appointed so.

Highly recommended, to everybody.

• Becoming a technical leader: an organic problem-solving approach
• ISBN: 9780932633026
• ISBN-13: 978-0932633026